GeoTIFF is a public domain metadata standard which allows georeferencing information to be embedded within a TIFF file. The potential additional information includes map projection, coordinate systems, ellipsoids, datums, and everything else necessary to establish the exact spatial reference for the file.

The simple alternative to the inlined TIFF geospatial metadata is the *.tfw World File sidecar file format which sits in the same folder as the regular TIFF file. This format provides only a subset of the functionality of the standard GeoTIFF. A world file is a plain text computer data file used to georeference raster map images. In contrast to the inlined GeoTIFF format World files do not specify a coordinate system, this information comes from the Map File Set itself.

There are free software tools that can be used to extract georeferencing information from standard GeoTIFF files to world files. For more information please visit https://trac.osgeo.org/geotiff/.

When validating if a set of given files represents a TIFF World File format the Application Server checks if exactly one file with extension .TIFF and exactly one file with the extension .TFW must be present, no other files are allowed in the Map File Set.