I know there are some formats that are for raw files, but most others are compressed. Why are there so many of those?
In: Technology
Because technology goes on.
Consider the venerable JPEG, for instance.
When it was released in 1992, it was really groundbreaking stuff.
It was, for years (arguably a decade or more) the best or near the best for what we could achieve for general-purpose compression of photographs.
Everybody scrambled to add support to their graphical software to compress (save) or decompress (open) JPEG images.
But time goes on.
Mathematicians keep doing research.
Computer scientists keep doing research.
Hardware becomes more capable.
JPEG, once the pinnacle achievement of graphical compression, is now, frankly, dog shit.
We can do much better now.
But, we have all this software around that’s already written to use JPEG.
And we have billions of people around the world who have saved all of their life’s memories in JPEG format.
So we can’t just *get rid of* JPEG.
And we can’t just change it, either, since that would cause confusion with older software.
So we introduce new file formats like WebP or HEIC or AV1.
Some newer software will support these new (and much superior) formats in addition to JPEG, while some older software will only support JPEG.
As time goes on, you may see JPEG very slowly and gradually decrease in prevalence.
But it won’t disappear completely.
People are very stubborn and there are a lot of people out there who have been using JPEG for 25 years and will fight tooth and nail to keep using JPEG for another 25.
So it goes.
Just in the world of graphics (let’s not get started on audio and video) we have TIFF, XPM, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, MNG, JPEG2000, JPEG XL, FLIF, WebP, HEIC, AVC, AV1, BGP, etc.
There are a few situations where different file formats have different advantages (most famously PNG vs JPEG, where PNG can only be used for lossless compression and JPEG can only be used for lossy compression, and so both co-exist side-by-side).
But for the most part, the newer formats are just flat-out superior to the old ones.
AV1 is just flat-out superior to both JPEG and PNG.
But JPEG and PNG will both survive for probably at least a couple more decades, just due to people being used to them and being resistant to change.
Ask this question again in a few years and there’ll probably be another few acronyms to add on to the list.
I doubt the list will *ever* get shorter.
Every time we make a new technical breakthrough and get a better file format, we still have to support the old ones for legacy purposes.
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