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Hmm; Tiff is still the default universally-readable format for many lossless purposes. It also seems to be used automatically in places: e.g. in Lightroom, clic

Hmm; Tiff is still the default universally-readable format for many lossless purposes. It also seems to be used automatically in places: e.g. in Lightroom, clicking "External Editor" sends a TIF file to the external editor and imports it back by default. I thought it was also used in some scientific/analysis scenarios as well. I thought I also saw BMP in a lot of games for some reasons (not to mention it's default output for the default image program on the effectively default consumer PC OS :)

ryandvm 5y ago
GeoTIFF is an interesting extension of TIFF that seems to serve a niche that other image formats cannot. It doesn't have the compression of say WebP or PNG, but the fact that it can have rich geographical metadata (projection, coordinates, etc.) makes it incredibly useful for GIS applications.
- kylebarron 5y ago
  GeoTIFF does have internal compression support. In fact you can compress your GeoTIFF internally using WebP [0]. [0]: https://gdal.org/drivers/raster/cog.html#general-creation-options https://gdal.org/drivers/raster/cog.html#general-creation-op...
- riedel 5y ago
  Also DICOM for medical imaging is afaik based on TIFF
  - sairahul82 5y ago
    DICOM is a container. It can contain any format including jpeg, tiff, png etc.
    - yread 5y ago
      tiff is also just a container it can contain lz compressed data or with some lossy compression
a_lost_needle 5y ago
They are very much still in use in at least one government.
handrous 5y ago
I think bitmaps are often used in 2d games for level definition or various other sorts of mapping (height, for 2.5d games, et c.)
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  Bitmap is the easiest image file format in the world to read/write and the easiest and sometimes fastest to shoot over to any video device in the history of computing. Almost every game making tutorial going back to the 80s has "how to read/write" bitmaps usually in it somewhere. Even 3D games will sometimes use them in a lot of odd places because it was faster/easier/took fewer cycles to include an uncompressed or simple run-length encoded bitmap than to try to store a smarter image format and need time to decompress it. (Though yes modern GPUs often support image decompression directly for certain texture file formats and that's shifted a lot.)
  - pcwalton 5y ago
    TGA is easier because the rows go top-to-bottom, you don't have the RIFF header, and you don't have to pad each row to 4 bytes. I still copy and paste a little TGA encoder into my graphics code when I need to dump something out for debugging.
  - Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
    That's why some games have uncompressed audio files which made the game size ballooned up. If the game have so much audio on, it would be best to use uncompressed audio as CPU don't have to spend extra resources to decode bunch of audio files at the same time when the games is asking for it.
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      This is a small pet peeve of mine. Even though PCs have mostly lost dedicated "sound cards" they still have dedicated hardware for sound decompression in their SoC packages. The big reason I think games often think they need so much uncompressed audio has not as much to do with hardware support as much as it is that games and general consumers "forked" on different compression paths in audio. Most consumer audio is MP3 and has been for decades, while most game audio went to patent unencumbered formats like Ogg Vorbis. Everyone has MP3 hardware decoding and almost no one has Ogg Vorbis in hardware. Even with the MP3 patents expired I think game companies just forget it exists as a well-supported lowest common denominator format with a wealth of hardware support. Sure, MP3 is a lossy compression format, but the specific losses in MP3 would hardly matter in most game soundscapes (and also Ogg Vorbis is similarly lossy, though "better" in double blind studies of single audio files). (Some of that I think is also political/contractual in the way that using MP3 would give some additional types of PC players "free soundtracks" while using other compression formats is a bit of security through obscurity and raises the bar slightly for PC players that don't, for instance, know what Ogg Vorbis even is.)

ryandvm 5y ago

GeoTIFF is an interesting extension of TIFF that seems to serve a niche that other image formats cannot. It doesn't have the compression of say WebP or PNG, but the fact that it can have rich geographical metadata (projection, coordinates, etc.) makes it incredibly useful for GIS applications.

kylebarron 5y ago
GeoTIFF does have internal compression support. In fact you can compress your GeoTIFF internally using WebP [0]. [0]: https://gdal.org/drivers/raster/cog.html#general-creation-options https://gdal.org/drivers/raster/cog.html#general-creation-op...
riedel 5y ago
Also DICOM for medical imaging is afaik based on TIFF
- sairahul82 5y ago
  DICOM is a container. It can contain any format including jpeg, tiff, png etc.
  - yread 5y ago
    tiff is also just a container it can contain lz compressed data or with some lossy compression

a_lost_needle 5y ago

They are very much still in use in at least one government.

handrous 5y ago

I think bitmaps are often used in 2d games for level definition or various other sorts of mapping (height, for 2.5d games, et c.)

WorldMaker 5y ago
Bitmap is the easiest image file format in the world to read/write and the easiest and sometimes fastest to shoot over to any video device in the history of computing. Almost every game making tutorial going back to the 80s has "how to read/write" bitmaps usually in it somewhere. Even 3D games will sometimes use them in a lot of odd places because it was faster/easier/took fewer cycles to include an uncompressed or simple run-length encoded bitmap than to try to store a smarter image format and need time to decompress it. (Though yes modern GPUs often support image decompression directly for certain texture file formats and that's shifted a lot.)
- pcwalton 5y ago
  TGA is easier because the rows go top-to-bottom, you don't have the RIFF header, and you don't have to pad each row to 4 bytes. I still copy and paste a little TGA encoder into my graphics code when I need to dump something out for debugging.
- Isthatablackgsd 5y ago
  That's why some games have uncompressed audio files which made the game size ballooned up. If the game have so much audio on, it would be best to use uncompressed audio as CPU don't have to spend extra resources to decode bunch of audio files at the same time when the games is asking for it.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    This is a small pet peeve of mine. Even though PCs have mostly lost dedicated "sound cards" they still have dedicated hardware for sound decompression in their SoC packages. The big reason I think games often think they need so much uncompressed audio has not as much to do with hardware support as much as it is that games and general consumers "forked" on different compression paths in audio. Most consumer audio is MP3 and has been for decades, while most game audio went to patent unencumbered formats like Ogg Vorbis. Everyone has MP3 hardware decoding and almost no one has Ogg Vorbis in hardware. Even with the MP3 patents expired I think game companies just forget it exists as a well-supported lowest common denominator format with a wealth of hardware support. Sure, MP3 is a lossy compression format, but the specific losses in MP3 would hardly matter in most game soundscapes (and also Ogg Vorbis is similarly lossy, though "better" in double blind studies of single audio files). (Some of that I think is also political/contractual in the way that using MP3 would give some additional types of PC players "free soundtracks" while using other compression formats is a bit of security through obscurity and raises the bar slightly for PC players that don't, for instance, know what Ogg Vorbis even is.)