Which image format do you prefer?

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I don't think anyone's asked this one, so I figured I would, just out of curiosity. I personally like PNG. Unlike JPEG, it's lossless compression, so there's no degradation of quality. Unlike GIF, you can use partial transparency. SVG sounds promising too.

Well, to me it all depends on what you want to do with the image. For publishing photos on the web, JPEG is still without equal (small filesize, invisible defects when watched on a normal screen), but is nearly useless for anything else. For high-quality printing of photographic material, TIFF is the best way, especially for poster-size pictures. For logos, icons and the like (simple pictures that have to be scalable), SVG is king. The fact that it's pure XML (i.e. text files) makes it great for version control. PNG is great for computer drawings and other pictures with a limited colour palette, and indeed when you need transparency.

In other words, apart from GIF and BMP (which have mostly been superseded by newer and better formats), all the formats you list have an area where they are more useful than the others.

Personally, I do most of my image work in Gimp. I use Gimp's own format for all work in progress, and only convert to another format at the last moment, when I'm ready to publish. And the format I choose depends on what I'm planning to do with the picture.

I also do scalable artwork, in which case I work in Inkscape exclusively, and thus use the SVG format.

are questions like this really important? Questions like this let me think of those stereotypes of aspies in the mass media. Nerds who are only interested in meaningless technical details.

Sorry, but i think you should have posted that somewhere else.

Anyway, i wish you happy day.

anton

Of course this is important. Compression formats are very interesting to us computer geeks. Obviously a mundane like you would not understand. </geek elitism>

And what's wrong with being a nerd? Nerds are awesome.

Lossless compression and an alpha channel devoted exclusively to transparency. Most definitely my favorite format is PNG.

Definitely PNG. I've tested all the formats and this one is the best. Although GIFs are the coolest; the animated ones.

I always use PNG because of the lossless quality.

Depends on the image. If it's something small or if I don't care about quality, I'll use JPG or GIF. If it's something that I want to preserve the quality, I'll use PNG.

There is no reason to use gif over png unless its an animated gif. An 8 bit png should be smaller than the equivalent gif, and look nicer.

I wasnt going to post until I found out that topics like these perpetuate a stereotype. But I always say, if your nature embarrasses someone, its time to double down.

I am an aspie and I like PNGs and other obscure technical trivia. Here I am, deal with it.

JPEG, although I love animated GIFs. But use jpeg formal more often.

I find that JPEG is nice for pretty much anything, especially since you don't really have to compress the hell out of them anymore due to high internet bandwidth. I find JPEG to be quite adaptable in that manner, plus it's easy to work with.

PNG is definately my favourite. Pictures compress well even though they're lossless and the transparency gives it the last boost. I've come to like PNG a lot since I started my current education, where we, among other things, program game engines. Transparency makes it easy to use in 2D graphics without it taking up too much space.

GIF, however could use an update. The animation feature is nice, but it's quite limited by its low colour depth (256 colours)

I can totally relate to this. I once took a screenshot of my terminal and converted it to a JPEG. The text was completely illegible.

.png for anything non-photographic, .jpg for anything photographic.

SVG is also pretty awesome for illustrations. Of course anything photographic requires PNG (if it still needs editing) or JPEG (if it is supposed to be unchanged).

PNG and SVG