Why are there so many different formats for image files?
Why don’t we have just one format instead of dozens? Because back in the early days of home and office computing, every program saved its stuff in its own unique way. Computer geeks came up with the name native format to refer to a program’s unique file format. PC Paintbrush was an early painting program in the DOS world. The native format was PCX. It became so popular that a groundswell of format images emerged. In an effort to attract users, other programs started supporting PCX, making it a de facto standard. The following sections explain the most important file formats and when to use them. TIFF: The great communicator One of the best and most useful formats for saving images it TIFF (Tagged Image File Format. TIFF was developed to serve as a platform-independent standard so that both Macintosh and Windows programs could take advantage of it. Most programs that support TIFF also support LZW, which will compress your image without loss of data. JPEG: The space saver JPEG stands for
