Modern Image Formats Explained In Detail

| Published: Monday, January 13, 2020, 10:42 [IST]

The modern world of computers is very huge and complex and there are alternatives for almost every technology with their own pros and cons. When it comes to photos and images, we have a large set of commonly used formats and here are the abbreviations and use cases for some of these image formats such as jpeg, jpg, and png.

JPEG/JPG

JPEG/JPG is the commonly used image format, which stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. This format came into existence in 1992. This format offers a compression ratio from 10:1 to 20:1 while maintaining the actual quality of the image. JPG is a short extension for JPEG, as old OSs like MS-DOS only support three-letter extension names.

Most of the cameras, including smartphones, and even photo editing app saves images in JPEG format by default, as it is universally accepted.

GIF

GIF is also one of the widely used formats on social media. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, derived from the bitmap image format. This format was created in 1987 by a scientist named Steve Wilhite. It uses the LZW compression algorithm, that lets this format to maintain the image quality even after compressing.

PNG

PNG or Portable Network Graphics is called the raster-graphics file-format that lets users create images that do not lose the quality even after zooming into the photo, most of the time with a transparent background. It was developed as a replacement for the Graphics Interchange Format or GIF format in 1996.

SVG

Scalable vector graphics, often called SVG is mostly used by professions to create two-dimensional images that can interact. It is an open standard format, developed by World Wide Web Consortium in 1999. The characteristics of SVG files are defined in XML text files.

EPS

EPS Encapsulated PostScript is a self-contained graphics file format. This format can be used to make an image or drawing on a number of professional apps likes Abode Illustrator and Adobe InDesign.