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Comment by craigds | Hacker News Reader

So it's a 16 bit RGBA bitmap with no support for custom headers, internal tiling, custom bands, band interleaving, or overviews. or compression. Simplicity is great and all, but all those features are actually really useful things to have...

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What do you need custom headers for? I think this problem is better solved with tagging file systems. BIP/BSQ Image Encoding can be done just well (you have (2^16)^3 colors), but you need to leave the interpretation to the outside. It is definitely not in scope of this format to handle that internally. Compression is external, so yeah, it definitely can be used.

All the things you presented are useful to have, but the question is: For which percentage of people is it useful to have? Is it solved by something else in a better way? You can never please the 1% without making everything harder for the 99%.

I'm probably in that 1% you mentioned. I work with large aerial photos (usually >10000x10000) with varying numbers of bands. Headers are excellent for georeferencing, storing band information, attribution etc.

> tagging file systems

Like HFS+? I'm somewhat ignorant, not sure what other filesystems support this. What tools do? I have no idea if I rsync a file from my mac to a server, and back to a Windows box, if you'll still be able to see the metadata. This strikes me as a huge weakness compared to just supporting internal headers like every other image format.

As others in this thread have said, it's a format for image filtering, not storage. Headers and compression get in the way when all you really need is a matrix of pixels.

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