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Image file formats that didn’t make it

tedium.co

11–20 of 210 posts

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#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 output for the default image program on the effectively default consumer PC OS :)

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#13
post #6
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.

BMP and TGA have the advantage that they're uncompressed, so it's mostly trivial to dump the contents of your framebuffer to a file without any major dependencies.

You can write an uncompressed PNG IIRC.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#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.

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#17
I want to be pedantic and point out the Nokia 3310 used to illustrate WBMP didn't support WAP. It should be the 3330, which has a reversed (white with blue details) case. (I know the "XpressOn covers" are swappable, but it's clearly a PR shot not someone's random phone).

Re: Image file formats that didn’t make it

#19

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…

GeoTIFF is an interesting extension of TIFF that seems to serve a niche that other image formats cannot. It doesn't have the compression of say WebP or PNG, but the fact that it can have rich geographical metadata (projection, coordinates, etc.) makes it incredibly useful for GIS applications.
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