Photo storage: PNG vs. TIFF

[John Faughnan]

For lossless storage of photos we (today) have PNG and TIFF (there are other possibilities, such as JBIG or LuraWave, but they seem to be going nowhere). Since my Canon G2 uses the barely supported (by Canon on the OS X platform) RAW format, I usually shoot in highest quality JPEG, then change to TIFF/PNG if I want to edit the shot. After I move an image to TIFF/PNG I stay with that. My question is whether I should keep my images in TIFF or in PNG. TIFF is much more common. LZW-compressed with prediction TIFF files are smaller than PNG. Uncompressed TIFF can be read by most apps, LZW compressed by many, and LZW-compressed/predictive by a few. There are Mac and Windows versions of TIFF. PNG is less common, but has a well defined standard. Most graphics applications can now open and save PNG, though not all support the PNG standard fully. I'm betting that 100 years from now that PNG will be easily read, but that some TIFF variants may be hard to "read". (OK, I admit, if there's still civilization 100 years from now I doubt they'll find reading any accessible binary data much of a challenge -- assuming there's interest in photos of biologicals, but I digress. Maybe the question is more about 10 years from now.) So I'm thinking PNG has the best combination of compression, portability, and archival support. On the other hand most experts seem to use TIFF or Photoshop's proprietary native lossless format (PSD). Do they know something I don't? Thorsten, what do you use? john jfaughnan@spamcop.net

[thorstenlemke]

Am 27.10.2002 15:50 Uhr schrieb "John Faughnan" unter <jfaughnan@yahoo.com>: > So I'm thinking PNG has the best combination of compression, > portability, and archival support. On the other hand most experts > seem to use TIFF or Photoshop's proprietary native lossless format > (PSD). Do they know something I don't? Thorsten, what do you use? You can use both formats. The most important thing is: They are lossless. Thorsten