The universe of digital image file formats is large.  The good news is when it comes to today's digital photography, there is broad agreement about what file formats make the most sense for the majority of uses. The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format is arguably the most popular and versatile format in use today and is likely to continue it's utility well into the future. Nearly all digital image devices support this format. Cameras, digital photo frames, printers, photo kiosks, photo product production machines, mobile phones to name a few all support JPEG. Similarly, photo related services like digital printers, online hosting and sharing sites, online forums, blogs, scanning and restoration services all use and support JPEG.

There are other formats, typically used for commercial printing, photography, and in the graphics arts community. These formats tend to be used for specific purposes apart from the general use JPEG file format. Often, these other formats are ultimately converted to JPEG in their final form to maximize usability. These formats include TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), RAW (family of minimally processed image formats), PNG (Portable Network Graphics), GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), and BMP (Windows bitmap).

At FotoBridge, we provide JPEG files as the standard file format delivered with every scanning package. We also include a free duplicate "Web Ready" JPEG file which is useful when a full sized JPEG is not ideal - such as when emailing or loading a large number of images to a digital frame. Whether delivered on DVD or CD, all the delivered JPEG files are fully open and unrestricted for copying, editing, renaming, resorting, slideshow/movie making, uploading - you name it, you can likely do it with JPEGs.

FotoBridge also offers TIFF files (in addition to the two included JPEG versions) as an option for slides and negatives packages, ordering this option means you receive three files for every photo scanned (TIFF, JPEG, and Web Ready (small JPEG)).

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