We constantly bandy around the terms JPG and TIFF, in particular, and note that downloaded logo or graphic could be a PNG. But what do they all mean? I’m no expert, but I now know a lot more after reading this article in Macworld by Lesa Snider. Most of us know this one, by the way:
JPEG stands for the Joint Photographic Experts Group that developed it. It supports a wide range of colors, so it’s the one most folks capture on their cameras and scanners (JPEG works well for black-and-white photos, too). However, JPEGs are also compressed, so some detail gets sacrificed to produce a smaller file size, which is great for maximizing space on your camera’s memory card, posting online, or for sharing via email.
But GIFs, TIFFs and PSDs could do with a bit of further explanation and so Lesa’s article is a good place to mug up on the facts.
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Honestly, the world does seem to make simple things hard doesn’t it?
All that is in any of those files with all the silly ‘file extensions’ is data.
Take a look at a file as used on an IBM midrange system, and it is just a file, the file name is (from memory) ten alphanumerics long and it is the label for a box of data…
Why on earth would we want to know anything else?
Still I suppose gangs of nerds sitting around discussing standards, makes jobs for the boys.
Funnily enough, when I opened the ‘MacWorld’ page that you sent us to, an audible advert began which discussed the virtues of the NTFS file system for use on my USB storage… Just so long as I had a Windoze computer… This of course is where the rot began… DOS, until that rubbish came along, the world of computers had only ever gone forwards, albeit expensively.