Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

The hi res images are, themselves, also in some mysterious script: the ancient TIFF file format!

Why not just high res PNG files so that they're easier to view? :/

TIFF is a very versatile container format for various image-streams. It can encode multi-images(likes layers), with different compression (losseless, JPEG etc) and tiled images to read/write efficiently big images e.g. for astronomy, pathology (microscopy). It is the standard for archiving images.

Ok... my browser in Linux didn't handle them well and didn't even suggest a program to open them with.

How well does Windows handle them?

Does one really want to save an image to disk first to be able to view it? Would imgur have been a success if all their images were in TIFF?

First, this is obviously a problem with the browser ("I can't view a common image standard!"), not the image format (it may have other problems, but "third party software isn't supporting this format" isn't a real problem).

Second, assuming your goal is to study the picture, of course you want to save it to disk.

Do you consume a lot of hi-quality scans from museums/archives/libraries? This is the common standard. The LoC distributes all of the high quality scans in tiff format:

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3b40000/3b48000/3b4880...

Why do so many projects still distribute gz or bz tarballs when xz is the best?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com