There are various file formats for moving and storing your images and the first thing to think about when dealing with digital images is what format is likely to suit your needs best. In the case of your artHIVES website your images will need to be in either Jpeg of Gif format to upload to your website, however you might want to use your images for other purposes so it is best to be aware of all of the options before you start.

Here is a list of the basic file format types and what they are most useful for:

Gif (this acronym stands for Graphical Interchange Format)

Gifs are one of the most efficient compressed file formats. Gifs are great on a web page as they do not take forever to load when compared to other file types. However, Gifs do suffer from a fair amount of data loss when compared with a raw image file and the Gif system is limited to images which include up to 256 colours.

As a result Gif may look a little dull when compared with normal 16 million colour images. When looking at making images for the web, Gifs can be useful as there are two types of Gif and the 89a type can be saved in a transparent format. This can be great for web pages as you can use a version of your picture online which will act as a great background image with other text showing through.

Jpeg (Joint Photographic Expert Group)

Jpegs are a flexible and popular file format and the most suitable file format for your artHIVES website. If you want a compressed image, that is an image which doesn't take up space, but still want as many colours in the image as possible the Jpeg is the best option. The Jpeg image file standard does see some detail and data loss as a part of the compression, but it is almost as effective as the Gif standard and the images look a lot better. The one major pitfall with Jpegs is that they tend to lose their quality if you keep editing them as the file format recompresses an image every time you save it, shrinking the image and losing data in the process. If you want to do a lot of image editing use another lossless format (like Tiff) first to do the editing and then save the file as a Jpeg when you are done.

PNG (Portable Network Group) ** Not compatible with your artHIVES website **

PNG files use 16 million colours and a loss free compression mode so in this sense the format is quite useful. However, there are different format PNG files (depending on whether you are using a Mac or PC). The format is relatively new and won't always be recognised by digital imaging software.

Tiff (Tagged Image File Format) ** Not compatible with your artHIVES website **

Tiffs are useful if quality is important. The Tiff compression system is ``lossless'' in that you don't lose any data as a part of the compression process (or very little anyway). The Tiff uses LZW compression (otherwise known as Lempel-Ziv-Welsh) and while Tiffs are smaller than raw image data in memory terms they are a lot bigger than Jpgs of Gifs. Interestingly, you will sometimes be given the opportunity to turn LZW compression off when saving files using the Tiff format. There is almost never any reason why this is worth doing.

RAW (Raw Image Format) ** Not compatible with your artHIVES website **

Many cameras use this uncompressed image format for their image files. Raw files are free of compression and are not necessarily the most efficient size-wise. However, Raw files are easy to edit and you can be 100 per cent sure that the data contained in an image hasn't been tainted or compromised. If you are storing really important images sometimes it is worth keeping a backup version of the original image in Raw format. That way you can return to the original if any problems occur during the editing process.