What are tiled TIFF images?
The 6.0 TIFF specifications provide for breaking the TIFF image into roughly square tiles instead of horizontally-wide, but vertically-narrow strips. The standard TIFF method using strips provides adequate performance for low-resolution to medium-resolution images; however, applications can more efficiently access and process large, high-resolution images in tiled format. ArcGIS 9.2 and ERDAS IMAGINE 9.2 support 6.0 TIFF specifications, which include the use of tiled-TIFFs. Applications which do not support the 6.0 specification cannot open tiled TIFFs. Image tiles are defined by TileWidth and TileLength. All tiles in an image are the same size. Partial tiles are not supported. If an image’s total columns and rows are not a multiple of the Tilewidth or TileLength, then boundary tiles are padded to complete the tile. TIFF readers ignore padded pixels, however, the padded pixels add to the image size and waste disk space. For more information see Section 15: Tiled Images in the TIFF 6.0
