Most people tend not to think about the details of their online photo sharing experience. As long as their photos get from their computers to their online photo album, they could care less about the processes that got it there. The way that digital cameras designed, this really isn’t a problem, as most cameras and photo editing software support this approach. However, there’s a lot more that goes into online photo sharing than is obvious on the surface.
Those who are interested in the fundamentals of digital photography may be curious about different file formats. Many have heard or seen the terms for picture file extensions, such as .jpg (or JPEG), .gif, .tif, and .png. What do all these different three letter extensions mean?
JPEGs
The term JPEG actually stands for “Joint Photographic Experts Group” – the group that initially created the standard back in 1992. Since then, the JPEG has become the most commonly found picture file type on the Internet. This is primarily because JPEGs offer a tremendous amount of flexibility in terms of its compression and picture quality. That is, its possible to significantly reduce the storage size of a JPEG file by also reducing the quality. Back when the Internet was first starting out, downloading mutli-megabyte picture files just wasn’t practical. JPEGs could maintain a reasonable image quality while making the file size of the image much smaller.
JPEGs have remained an Internet standard thanks to this quality. People are able to make images much easier to transfer between computers without losing a significant amount of picture quality. The drawback to JPEGs is that it is a “lossy” format – this means that each time a picture is edited and resaved in the JPEG format, it loses a degree of quality.
TIFFs
TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format. TIFF files are versatile and high quality, supporting up to 48-bit color depth (compared to 8-bit for GIFs and 24-bit for JPEGs). The downsides of this format are two-fold. For one, TIFF files have a wide variance and an image viewer that can view one type of TIFF file can’t necessarily view anther. Secondly, TIFF files are not widely supported by web browsers, making them impractical for online photo sharing.
GIFs and PNGs
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. Like the JPEG, GIF files are also commonly found all around the Internet. GIF files are comparatively limited in their color palette – having only 256 colors to work with. This make GIFs a good choice for relatively simple pictures without a lot of color differences, such as cartoons and simple logos. While it a lossless format that doesn’t degrade in quality, it’s pretty rare that you’ll see a photograph in a GIF format in the modern age, since most cameras are able to take pictures with significantly more color depth.
PNGs, or Portable Network Graphics files, are the successor to GIFs. Unlike GIFs, they support truecolor, a 16-million color palette. PNGs are lossless, making them great for editing photos. Most web browsers support PNGs, but they can still be quite large. In many cases, the best choice is to edit a file in PNG format, then convert to JPEG for distribution.
For people who like to take photos and share them to friends and whoever else wants to view them, one can make use of photo hosting sites. Attaching them in e-mails and sending them multiple times only takes up a lot of time that frankly not many have much to spare. With photo hosting sites, one can share photos with everyone by only uploading the photos once.
It is a fact of life that not everyone we care about lives close to us. And printing copies of a hundred photos and sending them through mail not only requires some work and consumes a lot of time but can also cost us a lot. Free photo hosting websites solves all these problems.
Free photo hosting websites will allow one to share photos with everyone one knows and at the same time save money and time. Some of these sites allow one to upload multiple photos at the same time saving one valuable time. And while waiting for the upload to finish, one can do something else using ones time efficiently. Then after the upload is complete one can send the link to everyone one wants to share the photos to. They can look at the photos and download any photo that they would like.
Free photo hosting websites though only offer limited data storage space for one’s photos. They are able to make photo hosting free through advertisements. But bigger storage space requires some maintenance and has additional costs. That is why most of the sites offer bigger space for a monthly or annual fee. Also, they put limits on how big a photo file can be uploaded. This is to facilitate the size of the photo that can be rendered and the speed in which it will be rendered when the photo is viewed.
Many social networking sites offer free photo hosting. By using social networking sites, one can organize the photos into photo albums and be able to keep private pictures private and only allow people in one’s social network to view the photos. Some social networking sites also allow photo sharing where one can showcase photos posted by someone else in ones profile.
Other benefits that photo sharing offer can be allowing one to make an online portfolio. With the technology today, one can create digital images with the use of photo editing and image rendering software. These kinds of photos are considered art and one can showcase one’s talent in this field by posting images one has made through this method.
One can also showcase photographs that one took that shows one’s artistic talent. One’s love of photography can be showcased with the use of photo hosting sites. One can show off ones work to attract more clients. One can even sell the photos online by showcasing digital copies of it.
Different sites offer different services and different amount of storage space. One can choose which site would best fill one’s needs. One can also opt to pay a fee to have access to extra services and, as most photo hosting sites offer, unlimited storage space.
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