Windows 10 PCs will support universal image file formats: but which one?
For those of us who got a headstart into computing, in the early 90s, learning about image file formats was an exciting endeavor, as we delved into the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of each file type and its purpose.
A little History
JPEG was indeed one of the most interesting, as compression algorithms became popular due to the limited hardware resources of the times. The ability of cutting the size of an image down to a fraction was invaluable in a time when hard drives were barely a fraction of a Gigabyte. Unfortunately, the problem with early compression was that image degradation was the price to pay, in the form of ugly pixelated artifacts and blurriness.
GIF did not support compression at all, but since it could only support up to 265 colors, it never needed compression, so long as its use was limited to that of an advanced variation of Windows Bitmap, with transparency support, making it especially suitable for early PC games assets, and the web. The big perk with GIF, was its ability to store multiple images as a playable sequence. After more than two decades, GIF has seen a boost in popularity as a file format, thanks to social media’s new love affair with animated memes.
PNG has been the “new kid in town” for some time. While it does not support compression or animations, it’s a solid format that is considerably smaller than its competitors, with transparency support, in full color, which is a phenomenal feature in video editing, as it allows to produce image frames that require no green screen masking. PNG is extremely popular among 3D animators, who felt that other more advanced file formats like TIFF were just too difficult to deal with, and produced files that were simply too big to store.
One to rule them all
Technology has progressed greatly in the past 25 years, and the general consensus is that three file formats to handle three different tasks are simply two formats too many.
This is precisely why Apple has been adopting a new file format, HEIF (High Efficiency Image Format), a still-image version of MPEG H.264 video format, although this would not be the most exact way to describe it.
HEIF, just like GIF, is more like a compressed container file, not unlike a ZIP file, except that it can only be “unpacked” by specific playback software, or photo editing software like Photoshop. For instance, if we were to open an animated GIF in Photoshop, we would be able to see every keyframe of the GIF, in a separate layer, which would give us the ability to edit the animation and repackage it.
HEIF works in a similar way, except that support for editing is non-existent, and playback support is heavily proprietary, which makes HEIF not ideal for general use.
Supporting HEIF is a costly affair, unless you are Apple, who has been using HEIF in iOS for a while. Some of the many features of HEIF include information for sound and 3D data, making it extremely useful to take 3D photos that can be edited beyond the traditional 2D realm. This means that elements like optical zoom, and optical focus can be simulated after taking a shot, as well as augmented reality 3D assets, to significantly alter an image a lot faster, and without complex image-editing procedures.
Microsoft has began testing HEIF in its Windows 10 Photos app, perhaps to whoo iPhone users to consider Windows 10 as an alternative to iOS and iPad, to store their photos.
Who doesn’t love cross-platform compatibility? It sounds great, on paper, but the problem is that HEIF is still a very dicey format when it comes to patents and royalties. It’s not a format that can be edited, and Apple has been actively discouraging app developers from creating apps designed to share HEIF on social media.
With that being said, is HEIF the only format capable of such amazing feats?
The Alliance for Open Media, home of the AVI video format, has come up with a new image format, in response to MPEG’s proprietary monster, called AV1, which seems to have a lot of the same backers as HEIF, including Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
AV1 supports much of the same features as its rival, with none of the licensing requirements. The only reason why AV1 is not as heavily publicized, nor fully endorsed, is the fact that it’s still an ongoing project, from a group whose focus is very much on video, rather than still images.
At any rate, there is a push for a more streamlined image format, which needs to span across mobile and desktop devices, as well as wearables, especially as increased hardware performance meet power efficiency requirements, and network speed requirements.
Formats like HEIF and AV1 store images using half the storage space required by JPEG, with nearly lossless compression, and smaller size means faster transfers across slower networks.
Introducing formats like these as a replacement for obsolete formats like JPEG and GIF in websites and mobile apps is also a huge boon to mobile users who won’t need to pay for higher data tiers from their carriers, as images and other media plays a big factor in how much data is consumed.
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