For the last five years, Bill Crow has been working on HD Photo, a new image file format that's intended to supplant the JPEG format currently at the heart of the digital photography ecosystem.
I first met Bill many years ago when he came to BYTE to show us HP NewWave, which was probably the earliest effort to produce an object-oriented file system for Windows -- originally, believe it or not, for Windows 1.0. The connection between NewWave and HD Photo is tenuous, but it does exist in the sense that the metadata strategies we're seeing today (see the truth is in the file) point the way toward ending the tyranny of the hierarchical file system.
Today's podcast begins by revisiting NewWave, but it's mostly about HD Photo: Why it was created, how it works, what it will mean to both amateur photographers ("happy snappers") as well as pros, and how it will be standardized and baked into a next generation of digital cameras.
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