Image file formats that didn’t make it • Hacker News Board

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#31

Post by zwieback » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #7

Tiff is very much not dead. It is likely one of the image formats more widely used today. Terabytes of new tiff images are prodced every hour and distributed by many remote sensing operators. It is a really flexible and robust format also. How else are you going to store a floating-point multispectral image of 8 bands and 50.000 x 50.000 pixels, arranged tile-wise for easy cropping?

That was my reaction. To be fair author says: "Of the formats listed here, TIFF is probably the one most likely to still be in wide use, but it has evolved into a more specialized format for professionals, in comparison to something like JPG."

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#32

Post by mytailorisrich » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

sysadm1n wrote: post #4

Anecdotally, the first time I heard of TGA was in Tomb Raider. The Tomb Raider games of old had a screenshot feature that outputted TGA files of gameplay and were useful for making walk-throughs for other people (you would typically convert them to JPG when sharing on the web). And I still see BMP files being used even in modern games. Yeah: PNG is better, but BMP has its uses.

TGA is a great format for tinkering because it is very simple to code yourself to generate images and it is still widely supported.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#33

Post by jsrcout » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #10

> Today’s Tedium discusses 10 image formats that time forgot. > (list includes BMP, TIFF, TGA) I remember seeing lots of software using Quicktime PICT files, even on Windows, but I've never seen anyone break it down (Wikipedia does a bit[0]). Did everyone mostly use it as a container for JPEGs? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PICT

PICT, there's a blast from the past. Way back at my first job I ported our visual graph editor to the Macintosh. Scrolling was very slow at first due to continuously redrawing the graph, until I started saving it to a PICT as a sort of cache. Worked great, the Mac could draw a PICT very quickly.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#34

Post by kowbell » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #16

JPEG2000 is a big one that seems to be missing. It is used in medical imaging or something, because laws? But its visual quality is worse than old JPEG, despite a PSNR advantage. Apparently, compression researchers used to think that people care about PSNR.

I've always been curious about the distinction between JPEG and JPEG2000. From what I can find online, everyone says that the visual quality is better than JPEG, it just flopped due to slow adoption. Could you elaborate on your claim that it's worse?

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#35

Post by LocalH » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

IFF (or IFF-based formats) is a lot more widely used than some realize, just not usually with ILBM content nowadays. Microsoft RIFF (largely WAV and AVI, although animated Windows cursors also use RIFF), Apple's AIFF audio, Maya uses an IFF variant for raster image data, and even The Sims uses an IFF variant for many of its data files.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#36

Post by handrous » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #12

Hmm; Tiff is still the default universally-readable format for many lossless purposes. It also seems to be used automatically in places: e.g. in Lightroom, clicking "External Editor" sends a TIF file to the external editor and imports it back by default. I thought it was also used in some scientific/analysis scenarios as well. I thought I also saw BMP in a lot of games for some reasons (not to mention it's default ou…

I think bitmaps are often used in 2d games for level definition or various other sorts of mapping (height, for 2.5d games, et c.)

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#37

Post by avmich » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

I'd like to see a mention of FIF, fractal format from Iterative Systems, something quite different from other approaches to store images.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#38

Post by ZoomZoomZoom » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

Can we write FLIF off, or does it still have a chance at wider adoption? I remember quite a positive reaction on release, but don't see it in the wild, unfortunately.

https://flif.info/

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#39

Post by bluedino » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

PCX!

It's such a simple format. I remember reading about it as a kid, punching in some code to read the header, then the data, then the palette, having an image appear before my eyes. Fixing the bugs in my code made the image appear correct, what a great intro to debugging and seeing the results.

It seemed like magic at the time. Taking this binary data that was gibberish when looking at it with EDIT.COM and making it appear on the VGA screen

https://nambafa.com/tutorials-computer-graphics.php?series=d...

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#40

Post by p_l » Wed, Nov 10, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

sysadm1n wrote: post #4

Anecdotally, the first time I heard of TGA was in Tomb Raider. The Tomb Raider games of old had a screenshot feature that outputted TGA files of gameplay and were useful for making walk-throughs for other people (you would typically convert them to JPG when sharing on the web). And I still see BMP files being used even in modern games. Yeah: PNG is better, but BMP has its uses.

TGA was very popular in 3d games for a time, I do recall seeing lots and lots of textures and the like encoded as TGA.