Install the Windows TIFF IFilter

If, like me, you would like the contents of TIFF files crawled and included in SharePoint search results then this is easy to achieve by installing the Microsoft TIFF IFilter on your SharePoint server(s).  Here’s how:

1. Open Server Manager

2. Select Features and click Add Features

3. Select the Windows TIFF IFilter and click Next

4. Click Next

5. Click Close

6. Close Server Manager

7. Open the Local Group Policy Editor MMC snap-in (gpedit.msc)

8. Expand Computer Configuration -> Administrative templates -> OCR

9. Enable the Force TIFF IFilter to perform OCR for every page in a TIFF document

I won’t be enabling the Select OCR languages from a code page option as this particular SharePoint farm does not have any additional language packs installed.

10. Close the Local Group Policy Editor

11. Run IISRESET in a command prompt

12. Initiate a full crawl of the required content sources to process the TIFF files

Now the contents of TIFF files are indexed and listed in search results.