P: Support cataloging PNG files in Lightroom

I use Lightroom to manage photos from my iPhone. Screenshots made on the iPhone are png. (Great for taking a screenshot of google maps etc.) These are not imported and then can't be managed.

If there is a straightforward way to handle pngs in a Lightroom plugin, some of us would love to use it. There is an "any file" plugin for Lightroom which I was excited by, because it should allow one to catalog the _images_ that one has, and not just the _photos_. Unfortunately (due to the limitations of Lightroom, not the plug-in author's ingenuity), it required creating little jpg files all across my disk, and I found that so annoying that I abandoned it.

If you can create something usable, some of us would purchase it, and collectively we might send you enough money for you and your significant other to have a nice night out!

I think there is a *lot* of interest in loading PNG into Lightroom. I think people don't salute the flag you've raised here because:

* They aren't comfortable with plugins and/or
* They don't understand what you are offering, or
* They didn't read your post(s)...

I think you should do it, Jim! 🙂

Not supporting PNG is a deal-breaker for me. Cameras are not the only things that produce images, and I would love to catalog my digital visualizations with Lightroom - I usually produce PNG because it is loss-free yet untainted by compression license issues like tiff.

It is one of those silly religious things at Adobe, methinks, and they should just jump over their own shadow and implement this widely accepted and popular format. None of their reasons I have come across are "real" reasons. Just Do It.

I just want to chime in and point out that when Victoria Bampton claims that PNG is "not a format suited to photographs", she is dead wrong. One might as well claim that JPG is "not a format suited to photographs". Or TIFF. Or JPEG 2000.

As to the TIFF-vs-PNG "debate", the two formats are different with the key issue, to photographers or artists, being that TIFF doesn't intrinsically support a single unified lossless compression method. Several have been added, over the years, but picking one with legs that will supported in the future requires a lot of care, and frankly it's not an area in which most people want to have to become an expert in!

So why use PNG? Simple: it's one of three raster image formats natively supported by web browsers (the other two being JPG and GIF), it's always been unencumbered by licensing issues (unlike GIF), and it supports alpha layers (unlike JPG).

So if you want an image format that can be displayed on any computer or tablet or smartphone, that supports lossless compression and alpha layers and is fully open, you have only one choice.

Unless you want to use Lightroom... and then you have no choice! 8-(

Adobe, just add the format. It won't hurt you, and it will let us photographers that also do illustration use LR as our overall image management/indexing system.

Glad to know that there are experts out there when it comes to various file formats. Thanks for the information, but, for me, here is the bottom line. I shoot with a 5D and capture my images exclusively in the RAW file format. I catalog that work in Lightroom (and love the program for that purpose). Though I do some manipulation in Lightroom, I still do the majority of my "development" work in Photoshop (as I love the great variety of tools available to me there). For me, this is where the png format comes in and shines. In Photoshop I save "parts" of images (with transparent backgrounds) as png files and then re-introduce those png elements or parts files back into the final composite image as needed or desired. If I were able to access those png "parts" in Lightroom it would certainly streamline my workflow a great deal. Due to the large size of many of my pieces I often use the psb format for my layered work files, files from which I both extract and introduce png files. My final output is typically TIFF.

See also:
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

Or is it a png emulating a tiff?

Hmm - looks like a bit of a tiff developing here...

You really, really should learn more about a topic before trying to argue it.

a) Incorrect. TIFF has been updated through tech notes 3 times (I know, because I wrote one of them). And people are actively requesting, receiving, and using custom tags.

b) Incorrect. When TIFF was created, that patent was not known. And that patent expired several years ago. It was unencumbered when created, and is now as far as anyone can tell.

c) Sort of correct, but off base. TIFF itself is not an ISO standard, but is a basis for many ISO standards. Again, TIFF has been updated, even if the master document has not.
And there really isn't that much incompatibility. The worst I know of are some video apps that don't understand transparency versus arbitrary alpha channels.

d) Incorrect. TIFF 6.0 included all you claimed except ICC profiles - they didn't exist at the time it was written. The technotes cover JPEG compression, ICC profiles, extensions for LAB, floating point, and predictors for floating point (which PNG does not have). The BIGTIFF extension isn't an official technote yet, waiting on more implementations to test against.

Um, not paying attention to LibTIFF are you? I've been working with them to extend TIFF for about 12 years now.

PNG is simple. It has that going for it. It doesn't support many color modes, or bit depths, or compression schemes, or metadata standards, or multi-page extensions, or pyramidal (not interlaced) storage, or exabyte sized files, etc.

TIFF does support a lot more, which can make it more complex. But TIFF is still more widely supported, and can do a lot more than PNG.

Oh, and archivists prefer TIFF.