On 12/1/06, Nathaniel spangineer@gmail.com wrote: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Scriptorium/Archives/2006/11#TIFF_f....
From what I understand, PNG's aren't all that great for photographs (or in
the Wikisource case, scans of pages of books and other documents) and don't work well with scanset, and JPEG's are ridiculously large for the same amount of information as is in a TIFF. Discussion on Commons ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#TIFF_files.3F) seemed to suggest that the real problem was image size, but again, it looks like JPEG's would end up being bigger than the TIFF's.
PNG and TIFF are in the exact same boat in this regard. JPEG isn't necessarily bigger, but rather we should expect objectionable artifacts in JPEGs.
The misconception that PNGs are somehow low quality for continuous tone images appears to be rampant in our community and it needs to be stopped. What PNGs actually are is space inefficient, and while people might argue that *space is cheap*, bandwidth is not and until we have cross-format thumbnailing, size will remain a major factor in our selection of upload formats.
We also have the worry that "TIFF" doesn't actually tell us what it is.. TIFF is one of those generic wrappers which people can (and do) shove all sorts of random crap into... including proprietary/patented formats (I've seen TIFFs stuffed with Mr.SID for digital orthophotography), although it's not that common since most things can't read such tiffs.
At the end of the day, we'd like to be able to store large images that are as detailed as possible, and be able to use them for proofreading on Wikisource.
The best format for this is dejavu, which we support, but we don't have support for either the browser plugins or serverside autoconversion.
The only advantage I see for tiff is that some of the browser plugins have nice navigation abilities.. but the same is true for dejavu... if we're going to put something up that needs a browser plugin it should be the free software solution. Dejavu also happens to have MUCH better compression, and it would also be an acceptable lossy solution for photographs as well.. better than jpeg.