What is PGM?
PGM is the greyscale member of the Netpbm family: a three-line header, then one brightness value per pixel with no compression. It is what image-processing courses, OCR pipelines and computer-vision tools pass around when they want a format with no decoder in the way.
What is TIFF?
TIFF is the archival and print format - lossless, high bit depth, and flexible enough to hold multiple pages in one file. Scanners, publishing workflows and document archives lean on it heavily. Browsers have never displayed it, which is why it is offered here as a target rather than a source.