Re: Re: Best Lossless Hi-Res Photo Storage with PHP

On Jun 12, 2004, at 4:36 PM, Kim Steinhaug wrote:

well, there are formats that have impressed me. The Mpg-4 format which requires plugins all over the place is really amazing, from e-vue. They also provide a plugin atleast for IE to browse the images. I dont know if you can compress images outside the windows platform however.

That's a key problem. I don't touch Windows unless I have to, so I don't primarily run it at home and my servers _never_ run it, so this format is totally out of the running - I need to be able to compress/decompress on *nix based machines.

If your looking for supreme quality however, you would need to stay away from the lossy formats and probably go for TIFF which is a great format and is also supported by any major software. PNG however is abit "strange", woudnt sendt PNG images to a publisher... You could ZIP the TIF images on the HD to same space, you often get good results on this. This would also make the downloads better for the user, and since all the browsing online would use thumbnails you dont need to waste CPU do depack the images, since you all users can depack a ZIP file (thats the least you would expect from a user that purchase a High resolution image).

I've experimented, PNG is notably better than ZIP for compressing image material. PNG retains 100% quality and offers the smallest file sizes around in a file that can be read by almost any system (i.e. all half-recent browsers, photoshop, most other graphics applications, etc). There's no reason I can't also offer a TIFF file, but I'll primarily route the user to the PNG file because it's simply the smallest download yet retains 100% quality and is a completely "free" format.

Ive created such systems myself, and my sollution was another : Plug in a new harddrive. We save the images as jpg, tif, eps, ai or whatever the original image was created as, and create thumbnails at various resolutions in high compressed jpg for fast browsing. Often I tend to ZIP the lossless images aswell, but then again I dont need to since HD isnt a problem atleast in my case.

I have a similar system implemented with thumbnails and caching and all sorts of things. Works great. But hard drive space is a major concern, so I have to be more conservative with the hi-res versions.

Hope this helps.

Well, it's good to know that somebody else works with this sort of thing. Although I was really hoping to hear from someone who's worked with JPEG 2000 lossless (much higher than PNG image compression ratio!) via ImageMagick or something similar to that. Or perhaps any other interesting solutions people have come up with that beat PNG for compression. More thoughts anybody?