I agree with you that the two tags warrant review, and that bringing them to a single tag would be ideal.
I agree with @Midavalo's comment that:
All geotiff files are tiff files, but not all tiff files are geotiff.
I agree with another comment by @Midavalo that:
I can export a map from ArcMap as a TIFF file, without it being a GeoTIFF.
I also see some questions that involve pictures in TIFF files being hyperlinked to, or loaded as attachments to, features in spatial datasets. However, I think these have generally been tagged hyperlink or attachment instead and I think that is fine to continue with that.
I propose that a simple, pragmatic and quick fix to our TIFF/GeoTIFF tagging conundrum will be to:
- Rename tiff (via a moderator merge) to be a composite tag named geotiff-tiff, leaving tiff as a synonym, and that the tag excerpt for geotiff-tiff be:
Use this tag when referring to georeferenced or ungeoreferenced TIFF
(Tagged Image File Format) files.
- Merge geotiff (via a moderator merge) into the composite tag named geotiff-tiff, leaving geotiff as a synonym.
We have very few composite tags, and so I would not advocate creating them lightly, but in this case I think it is the cleanest fix.