file formats for scanning/archiving photos

tiff, jpg, or png? which is best for archiving? we may want to print the photos at some time. Or may not.

macgig,

Don't use jpg, it's lossy. Either tif or png are both lossless and will keep the files fully in tact no matter how many times they are opened and copied. jpg loses resolution each time it's opened and copied. And as good as png is, it's not as popular or in the public domain as much as tif. Believe I'd go with tif. That's what I use for all my personal files...

You might Google both tif and png and check what's said about them...

Noel

everything i've read so far points to tiff... but the files are huge. I guess that is the down side?

macgig,

It's the price you pay for a good, lossless file. Much preferable to jpg UNLESS you never open and re-open the file, then you could preserve the resolution using jpg. Hard to remember that though, especially 2-3 years from now...

Here's a web page that also compares other formats:
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=png+versus+tiff+files%3F Don't use gif, only 256 colors.

If you want to save room, looks like png would be better than tif and still lossless.

Suggestion, save both ways on your computer and look at the total size of all the images, then make your decision...

Noel

macgig,

Can't get the url to work... not sure why, but if it works for you, it's the second one down on the list. The actual url didn't work either - I'm re-booting.

Sorry about that, Noel

EDIT: Here, I'll try it again: http://deadline.3x.ro/adsense/graphs.html

OK, that worked!! Noel

thanks

png looks like a good choice.....I may go with that.

It won't hurt to save them as jpegs as long as you're not re-opening and re-saving them over and over as jpegs. Just make sure they stay the original size and saved with a 10-12 compression.

If you save as tif (which I do until it's off to the printer), use a zip or jpeg compression, that will take the file size down. You could always divide the files into categories too, then stuff em.

to save space you can use tiff, rgb color space and select LZW compression - LZW is a lossless algorithm

compare LZW tiffs to PNG (24) to see what best suits you

louishen said:

to save space you can use tiff, rgb color space and select LZW compression - LZW is a lossless algorithm

compare LZW tiffs to PNG (24) to see what best suits you

Click to expand...

Good call, louishen, I had forgoten about LZW compression - long time no use, but a realy good solution to condense tif files.