When a scanning device or a camera creates a digitized file, that file must be stored on the device in some kind of file format. The most common format is referred to as the JPEG format. There are, however, dozens of different image file formats. The most common file types include the following;
TIFF — Preferred archival format
JPEG — A lossy file format
PNG — Lossless but compressed
GIF — A compressed file format, not preferred by archivists
RAW — Used by higher end digital cameras
BMP — Microsoft proprietary format
PSD– Used by Photoshop
