Digital photos are stored as files on memory cards and computer hard disks. They can be stored in different file formats (each format has a unique file extension). Most of the formats are compressed to save space and each has its own pros and cons.
The need for standard file formats
Digital photos are saved as digital files on electronic media. These digital photo files are a collection of bytes. If each manufacturer and camera would have used a proprietary file format then you would have needed proprietary software that could read, print and display those formats. Using a standard format allows any camera to save photos while any other software can read, display and print them.
What is compression and why it is needed
A digital photo is a collection of pixels each pixel is stored as a value that represents its color and intensity. Usually each pixel is represented by an RGB value (three numbers one byte each with values 0 to 255 representing the intensity of Red, Green and Blue that combined together create the pixels color). An RGB value occupies 3 bytes. So how big is a digital photo file? It depends on the number of pixels in the photo. For example if you shoot a photo using an 8 mega pixels digital camera the photo will have 8000000 pixels each one occupying 3 bytes. The total file size would be 8000000*3=24000000 or 24Mbytes. This is a very big file. Big files are harder to manipulate they take a long time to send by email, they occupy large storage space and they take longer to load.
In any digital photo there is data that is either redundant or that if removed the viewer would not be able to notice the difference. In addition representing pixels as RGB values is not efficient in terms of storage space. The process of compression takes advantage of these facts. When you compress a digital photo the compression software represents pixels in a more efficient way, removes redundant data and removes data that is not important. The result is a significantly smaller file. For example the above 24Mbytes file could easily be compressed to about 3Mbytes with hardly any noticeable quality degradation.
Before compressed digital photo files can be viewed or printed they need to be decompressed. Decompression is the reverse process of compression - a compressed file is converted to its original format usually a simple RGB pixel file. Using standard compression file formats allows one software to compress a digital photo file and another software to decompress it and process it.
Lossy or Lossless compression?
There are two main types of compression software: lossy and lossless. Here are the differences:
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