Computer help forum: Poll: What digital file format would you use?

For pictures, save as bitmaps. With compressed files, one corrupted bit and all the rest of the image is unrecoverable.

For text fies and other such documents, the standardized format would be XML. It is an international standard and is cross platform.

Images are harder. If you want to store them as images, I'd use TIF, a lossless compressed format. You could maybe convert to RAW format, which is pretty universal but has very big files. An alternative is to UUencode the images, which converts them to ASCII text. But remember to keep a copy of the corresponding UUdecode utility with them and keep updating it for current systems or set up a bootable UUdecode system on some kind of removable device (CD, USB Flash, etc.).

Obviously, film photos last longer. I use both film and digital cameras and have found that by comparison, my film photos are sharper and look better than printed-out digitals. Digitals, however, look great on computer screens. I've been using high grade (thicker)CDs for transfering my digitals, and am confident that if MS goes broke and everyone uses some other type of OS; there will always be entrepreneurs (just as there are now selling vinyl record players)who will be selling transfer programs from the "old MS" to the latest hot-shot system twenty years from now.

Having said that, I also use another option. I've been turning off the flash settings on digital and/or film cameras and taking pictures of photos that are on my computer screen. If you are careful, and adjust the size of your onscreen photos to fit the camera's aperture, the result of the photo is a near perfect image. That way, instead of using a scanner and printing out digitals that only look so-so, you'll have great film photos of them that will last for ages.

I think the most important thing for future-proofing is to be as platform-independent as possible.
I know people thing that MicroSoft will be here forever, but anyone with old Word or PowerPoint files will discover that MS abandons old file formats over and over. Same with Apple - many of my MacDraw files can't be opened with anything I have.

While Apple will open all JPEG I have come across, I can't say the same for Windows. PowerPoint documents made with JPEGs on a Mac will often open in Windows with graphics missing. The most likely to work across multiple platforms are PDF files and PNG files. This can be* a nuisance, as PNG files don't work in many DVD players that are set up display JPEG photos, but at least they work in most programs on both Apple and Windows.

I would say jpg. I don't think the way one saves images is such a big deal, since you can easily convert them to other formats by using software like PhotoShop or Gimp. As long as Adobe exists, we shouldn't have a crisis.

I chose "Other" for text documents because I would have chosen OpenDocument. I don't know why you didn't mention ODF because future proofing is what the format was designed for! PDF would have been my second choice, as when I send a document to someone I will send them a PDF.

As for images I chose PNG. While JPEG is the most popular and good enough in terms of the quality to filesize ratio, it is still a lossy format while PNG is lossless. Storage capacity and data transfer speeds are becoming non-issues even today, let alone in 10 or 20 years time.

In either case, paper hard copies and photos can be damaged and will deteriorate over time, just look at your grandparent's photos. I'll be damned if when I'm old and grey kids will say "Your time looks so drab and boring" .

The use of docx let me take advantage of various unique features. PNG is a kind of loseless format with quite a good compressibility.

No need to worry about finding the right program, since it's included in the data file. OS may be an issue down the road, but I doubt it.

ASCII is the most basic of all formats for text. It is not dependent on any software, OS, or computer to be read. They can all do it. In addition to being able to store alphanumeric characters, it has a limited number of symbols that it can store.

If you use any software's proprietary format: MS Office, PDF's, etc, you run the risk of the software becoming obsolete and leaving you in the cold.

Plain text is almost as good, but it lacks the symbol capability of ASCII. ASCII can be read by *any* reader that can look at characters on the storage media. Therefore, almost every program that deals with words or media viewers can read ASCII. If the file becomes corrupted virtually all of the data can be recovered.

I did not see Adobe DNG as one of the standards for Digital image archiving. While it's primarily controlled by a single vendor (Adobe), it does a fine job of preserving 12-bit and 14-bit digital RAW files. The DNG format coupled with advanced photo processing applications such as Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop CS3 and CS4 are beginning to approach 1 single standard for Digital RAW (Camera RAW) files.

My digital workflow in Lightroom 2.3 is set to convert all RAW files to DNG and store on my working DROBO drive. Also, make a backup of the images to a remote Network Share (where I store long-term on SATA drives off-site).

Working this way, I have had no issues converting older RAW files from Canon and Nikon cameras as far back as 2000.

I have my reasons for my preference in reading a pdf file. I have a hand tool with the pdf file that i can use to drag my text up and down the screen while I read. I have never found anything else but pdf that has this hand tool and I find it a far superior way of reading a document.

For this reason I hope pdf lives on.

For plain text, ASCII, it is universal and nearly error free. For graphics JPG, it is easily convertable to BMP for editing but BMP, while more simply editable and universal is a glutton for disk space.