Best file format for archiving photos

Question

Today I discovered that macOS Catalina dropped support for some raw image formats. I have 20,000 photos from 19 countries archived in one of the newly non-supported formats. Lots of people long dead, and places that no longer exist, or that I will never be able to revisit. Luckily, I have an old Snow Leopard machine that I can dedicate for the next six months converting these files to something useable. But what? Since they're camera raw, I'd rather not go JPEG. I'm considering TIFF, but want to make sure there isn't something better that might still be supported years from now.

mceachen · Accepted Answer

I've been working on digital archiving for a while now (check my profile for my current project). Here are some points to consider:
1. Don't delete your originals. Your conversion process may end up being lossy in some way (like with color depth or with metadata), and your future self will thank you for keeping the originals.
2. TIFF is a container format. It can hold a JPEG, or a lossless format. Don't think that all TIFFs are lossless.
3. Can dcraw not read all your originals? I've been really impressed by how many different raw formats that tool handles. You may not need to convert them if dcraw handles them. If PhotoStructure can import your raw files, dcraw can (as PhotoStructure uses dcraw under the hood for raw-to-tiff conversions).
4. Know that the default for images is to become irrelevant to the viewers of tomorrow. Add whatever content and context you can to as much as you can.

fsflover · Answer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_image_format#Standardizati...

mytailorisrich · Answer

Probably something lossless, ubiquitous, and that can handle more than 8 bits per channel. I think TIFF is the major standard and has been so for decades.Of course that may change in the future but at least, because TIFF is ubiquitous, I am sure that it will be easy to covert to a new standard and that there will be plenty of time to do it.