Imaging libraries in active development?

[Christian Heimes]

Am 28.11.2012 22:11, schrieb Jorgen Grahn:
> I thought those formats were dead since about a decade?  (Ok, I know
> TIFF has niches, but JPEG 2000?)

Baseline TIFF is still used a lot when a lossless image format is
required. It's widely used for scientific stuff, long-time preservation,
health care (e.g. MRI) and for many more applications. If you need to
deal with formats like 32bit float RGBA or 128bit complex float pixels
or color spaces like CMYK, CIELUV, CIEXYZ, then TIFF is your man.

I'm sitting on nearly a quarter petabyte of TIFF images. The data should
still be usable in 200 years. Bit rot *is* a serious issue for long
periods of time.

> That seems like an argument for *not* having support for many file
> formats in the imaging library itself -- just pipeline into the best
> standalone utilities available.

An imaging library shouldn't implement all file formats on its own and
rather use existing libraries. That's what I'm doing with smc.freeimage.
It wraps and ties together FreeImage and lcms. FreeImage itself contains
and encapsulates eight libraries (e.g. libjpeg, libtiff4, libraw, libpng
...) in a powerful API.

Christian