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?
I still remember trying to explain to a previous employer why I needed Debabelizer to create appropriately-striped TIFFs in addition to Photoshop. In hindsight, the me of today would have said then, "I just need it to do this job, which will make you far more money than it costs to buy a single license." The me of then wasn't quite as savvy.
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."
For quite some time TIFF was the default format for screenshots on OS X, which was probably one of its more prominent uses by the general public. During that period it was also pretty common for developers to use TIFF for application assets like toolbar icons and splash screens.
At some point that all shifted over to PNG, but macOS support for TIFF remains good to this day.
Yes, TIFF was (probably still is) the standard for capturing X-ray detector images with tons of channels, weird numbers of bits per channel, and custom metadata. I actually wrote a TIFF decoder in my first job. It is a crazy format though - "bi-endian" in that you have a choice of endianness.
Yea, I was confused when I saw TIFF in the list. I get email attachment with TIFF occasionally through my job. I know TIFF is still common in other fields. It is possible the author is in the fields that don’t encountered TIFF enough and went with the assumption that it is forgotten format.
When I was doing imaging, tiff was my go-to. It's uncompressed so huge images would pop open quickly (compared to loss-less png). I could store 16-bit CMYK images in tiff which no other format (except maybe PSD) would do.
Several years ago, I attended a talk at an imaging.org conference where the presenter, an archivist from the Smithsonian, described how they used tiff in their work.
TIFF is wonderful because it's so optimized for performance. When you get the tiling lined up just exactly right with your storage device block/page/stripe size and your CPU cache sizes, it just screams.
Don't forget having multiple images in one file - 200.000x200.000 pixel main tiled, pyramidal jpeg or jp2 encoded image, thumbnail, label, overview and barcode. Next to the standardized metadata like resolution and vendor-specific xml with descriptions of channels, wavelengths, antibodies and complete provenance. With libtiff and libtiff-tools to help you make sense of it.
I remember dealing with massive (for the time) TIFF files back in the 90s. I had some full page B/W scans at 1200 dpi which, converted into PostScript turned out to be virtually impossible to convey to my service bureau for outputting to film. I ended up having to send camera ready copy to the printers for them to photograph and strip into the plates in order to meet my press deadline. CD-R was still something in the future and I ended up having to support about 3 or 4 removable media drives to deal with incoming files from my authors.
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 :)
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
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.
JPEG-2000 was held back by intellectual property restrictions: patents but also the fact that the spec cost $1,500. A lot of the parties involved appeared to think that the technical merits made adoption inevitable and so they didn't spend time making it appealing with things like a test suite or high-quality open source implementation.
That had several impacts which scarred a lot of people I've worked with:
1. The commercial implementations were not interoperable and people get VERY nervous when they periodically get images which won't open correctly in one tool or, worse, have defects which one tool hides.
2. Many open source tools either didn't support the format at all or used Jasper, which just didn't get enough support to be fast or compliant.
3. Performance was quite slow for a while and people who weren't starting with Photoshop or native Mac apps (ImageKit uses the Kakadu codec, which has decent performance) were probably hitting Jasper or the Java implementation, both of which were orders of magnitude slower. People will forgive a certain performance hit for better compression but, especially as network bandwidth and storage capacity went up so much, the savings just weren't worth it if you could transfer and decode a JPEG in less time than it took just to decode the JP2.
4. All of that combined to mean browsers never really implemented it, other than Safari which picked it up via the standard image framework. The complexity meant that getting acceptable performance and security would be expensive and the demand just wasn't there.
5. The complexity of the format and low encoding performance meant that many JP2s were not encoded with optimized settings, which reduced the benefits to supporting it.
This makes me a bit sad because technically it was the only format for a long time which supported a wide range of colorspaces, bit depths, etc. and the way you can progressively decode a stream would have been a really neat option for responsive images in HTML — imagine if all your srcset had to do was say “Range-request bytes 1-x for 512x512, 1-y for 1024x1024, …” and the server + CDN could host & cache a single file for every client.
There are certain scenarios where the progressive / tiled decoding can make up for the friction (medical imaging and archival storage in libraries/archives) but they're not widespread enough to establish an entire image format. The open source situation has never been better with OpenJPEG but there just doesn't seem to be a high likelihood of significant increases in demand at this point.
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?
I think many of those proprietary wavelet compression formats seem to be missing. I remember that at around 2000 I recompressed my images every other week after finding yet another file format that could save me some disk space. Cannot even remember their names...
It also used to form the basis for Redcode, the file format used by RED digital cinema cameras. Not sure if the current version is still based on JPEG2000 though.
Digital cinema uses a kind of Motion-JPEG2000.
The encoding of the coefficients is so convoluted that cinema projector systems require custom hardware to do decoding in 2K at full speed.
The only software algorithm that could decode it at relative speed was patented by someone involved with the format: otherwise, software decoding is very slow compared to other formats.
JPEG2000 is also sometimes used to encode images embedded in PDFs.
I worked on a library that had to process PDFs and grabbed a bunch of PDFs from archive.org and other open sources for testing, and as I recall, about 2% of them had at least one JPEG2000 image. So if you're in the PDF space it's probably still worth considering.
I wish the author provided more information about the strangeness of some of these formats and why they're now obsolete. PCX being one of the oddest because it's ordered by planes. So the red, green, and blue components are split.
What this list is missing is WMF/EMF which were basically direct serializations of Windows drawing primitives.
> BMP files are usually not compressed and, therefore, are not well suited for transfer across the Internet
When BMP files were compressed they'd typically be given the extension .RLE.
The Amiga (EA) IFF format was adopted by Microsoft as RIFF (essentially the same format but with little-endian numbers for x86), which is the basis of WAV and AVI, among others.
> 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?
But was expecting MNG but didn't find it. Interesting history with that one, a few browsers implemented it but then removed it. Leading to a lot of geek angst.
Is bmp really dead? It's my go-to file format when playing around with graphic image programming (just stupid hobby stuff). It's easy to pick a format and write one out, and most everything reads it as a format that I've used, even on linux. It can be tricky reading one created by something else, but if you make assumptions based on the header sizes and the fact that you rarely run into one that not a simple 24-bit pixel array, its' not too bad. I do only use it as an interim format, though.
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.
Just to chime in, my 3D engine uses TGA to import textures too because the code is dead simple.
Sometimes when you are going to use your own format for saving data you could pick the simplest format for your import to accelerate productivity at the cost of diskspace.
In a similar way I use collada for character animations, it gets alot of slack from AAA studios (who all use FBX) but for indie development it's simple enough to be able to implement in a reasonable time (XML so you can see what's what)...
In the same line of thinking, I import static meshes from .obj, sound from .wav and last but not least font from .ttf!
The limiting factor usually is the editor you use to create/manipulate the assets in the first place, always look to the simplest export format they have, for Photoshop TGA is the simplest!
I export everything to my own custom binary formats to be loaded by the engine by customers, and there lz4 is a pretty good/simple RLE compression (RLE is also used by TGA BTW) and then .zip (also very simple!) to wrap it all up...
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.
Ha ha ha I work in an image format so forgotten it doesn't even make the forgotten list.
Computer Graphics Metafile bitches!
My god how I loathe that thing. It's kept alive in specifications purely by the efforts of a single software company flooding all the WGs with cheerleaders. "No, it's not obsolete, SVG is just a thing used by hackers and programmers"
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.
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).
[+] [-] enriquto|4 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] LukeBMM|4 years ago|reply
I still remember trying to explain to a previous employer why I needed Debabelizer to create appropriately-striped TIFFs in addition to Photoshop. In hindsight, the me of today would have said then, "I just need it to do this job, which will make you far more money than it costs to buy a single license." The me of then wasn't quite as savvy.
[+] [-] zwieback|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|4 years ago|reply
At some point that all shifted over to PNG, but macOS support for TIFF remains good to this day.
[+] [-] iscrewyou|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zardoz84|4 years ago|reply
also, DNG format (a raw format) it's a derivated from TIFF.
[+] [-] rwmj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Isthatablackgsd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linuxlizard|4 years ago|reply
Several years ago, I attended a talk at an imaging.org conference where the presenter, an archivist from the Smithsonian, described how they used tiff in their work.
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark-r|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yread|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhosek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tadbit|4 years ago|reply
Seeing it on this list makes me think the author didn't dig very deep when writing this article.
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|4 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] bluedino|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] ahartmetz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acdha|4 years ago|reply
That had several impacts which scarred a lot of people I've worked with:
1. The commercial implementations were not interoperable and people get VERY nervous when they periodically get images which won't open correctly in one tool or, worse, have defects which one tool hides.
2. Many open source tools either didn't support the format at all or used Jasper, which just didn't get enough support to be fast or compliant.
3. Performance was quite slow for a while and people who weren't starting with Photoshop or native Mac apps (ImageKit uses the Kakadu codec, which has decent performance) were probably hitting Jasper or the Java implementation, both of which were orders of magnitude slower. People will forgive a certain performance hit for better compression but, especially as network bandwidth and storage capacity went up so much, the savings just weren't worth it if you could transfer and decode a JPEG in less time than it took just to decode the JP2.
4. All of that combined to mean browsers never really implemented it, other than Safari which picked it up via the standard image framework. The complexity meant that getting acceptable performance and security would be expensive and the demand just wasn't there.
5. The complexity of the format and low encoding performance meant that many JP2s were not encoded with optimized settings, which reduced the benefits to supporting it.
This makes me a bit sad because technically it was the only format for a long time which supported a wide range of colorspaces, bit depths, etc. and the way you can progressively decode a stream would have been a really neat option for responsive images in HTML — imagine if all your srcset had to do was say “Range-request bytes 1-x for 512x512, 1-y for 1024x1024, …” and the server + CDN could host & cache a single file for every client.
There are certain scenarios where the progressive / tiled decoding can make up for the friction (medical imaging and archival storage in libraries/archives) but they're not widespread enough to establish an entire image format. The open source situation has never been better with OpenJPEG but there just doesn't seem to be a high likelihood of significant increases in demand at this point.
[+] [-] kowbell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] riedel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] royjacobs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Findecanor|4 years ago|reply
JPEG2000 is also sometimes used to encode images embedded in PDFs.
[+] [-] SavantIdiot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crummel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whoopdedo|4 years ago|reply
What this list is missing is WMF/EMF which were basically direct serializations of Windows drawing primitives.
> BMP files are usually not compressed and, therefore, are not well suited for transfer across the Internet
When BMP files were compressed they'd typically be given the extension .RLE.
[+] [-] kps|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|4 years ago|reply
> (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
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|4 years ago|reply
But was expecting MNG but didn't find it. Interesting history with that one, a few browsers implemented it but then removed it. Leading to a lot of geek angst.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-image_Network_Graphic...
[+] [-] godshatter|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sysadm1n|4 years ago|reply
And I still see BMP files being used even in modern games. Yeah: PNG is better, but BMP has its uses.
[+] [-] ginko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bullen|4 years ago|reply
Sometimes when you are going to use your own format for saving data you could pick the simplest format for your import to accelerate productivity at the cost of diskspace.
In a similar way I use collada for character animations, it gets alot of slack from AAA studios (who all use FBX) but for indie development it's simple enough to be able to implement in a reasonable time (XML so you can see what's what)...
In the same line of thinking, I import static meshes from .obj, sound from .wav and last but not least font from .ttf!
The limiting factor usually is the editor you use to create/manipulate the assets in the first place, always look to the simplest export format they have, for Photoshop TGA is the simplest!
I export everything to my own custom binary formats to be loaded by the engine by customers, and there lz4 is a pretty good/simple RLE compression (RLE is also used by TGA BTW) and then .zip (also very simple!) to wrap it all up...
Keep it simple!
[+] [-] mytailorisrich|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p_l|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LocalH|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MilStdJunkie|4 years ago|reply
Ha ha ha I work in an image format so forgotten it doesn't even make the forgotten list.
Computer Graphics Metafile bitches!
My god how I loathe that thing. It's kept alive in specifications purely by the efforts of a single software company flooding all the WGs with cheerleaders. "No, it's not obsolete, SVG is just a thing used by hackers and programmers"
[+] [-] sabujp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lizknope|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yboris|4 years ago|reply
https://jpegxl.info/
[+] [-] ksec|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReleaseCandidat|4 years ago|reply
Had been heavily used on SGIs as their 'native' image file format.
[+] [-] ZoomZoomZoom|4 years ago|reply
https://flif.info/
[+] [-] TylerE|4 years ago|reply
Smells very dead to me.
[+] [-] yboris|4 years ago|reply
https://github.com/cloudinary/fuif
But it too got superseded by JPEG XL (.jxl) https://jpegxl.info/
[+] [-] whoopdedo|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.compuphase.com/flic.htm
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tdeck|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avmich|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fredoralive|4 years ago|reply