"Brian Gregory" wrote

| PNG is about the best widely recognised format for totally lossless
| stored photos.
|

The most widely recognized in browsers. So it's good
for high quality images online when quality is important.
But it's still not widely used. It's just too big compared
to JPG.

| You might say one never needs 100% lossless but sometimes you do, like
| if you are doing complex photoshop type editing operations on a photo
| and want to be able to save your work and carry on later without the
| saving and re-loading introducing compression artefacts.
|

I use BMP or TIF for that. I could use PNG but it's
relatively bloated and it's also complex. Try saving
a big image as TIF and then PNG. PNG is a lot of
work to pack and unpack. It's slow. And as I wrote
to Java Jive, I did a test yesterday and found that
PNGs are much bigger than TIFs.

So, yes, I see it as potentially useful for online,
in a limited way, but otherwise of no value. I only have
a handful of PNGs on my system and they all seem
to be charts from webpages. The only value unique
to PNG is transparency, but I don't usually have a reason
to want that, and I don't know of any tools to take
advantage of it.

I actually wrote code at one time, or rather finished
some faulty code, for rendering PNGs. It's a nightmare.
I think there are something like 36 variations. But at
the time Windows Explorer couldn't render a PNG and
I was making an Explorer Bar. Yet I never really had
occasion to use the code because I never had occasion
to look at a PNG.