JPEG Opens Up, Learns to Share

We might be a little late to the game on this one, being as we’re both certainly not professional photographers, but we found this really interesting over at John Nack on Adobe, “Non-destructive JPEG: An Oxymoron.” It’s about the company’s new products, Lightroom the focus, that allow you to store metadata within standard JPEG photos, which means, essentially, they’ve given the ability to give histories to traditionally history-less files (i.e. flattened and that’s it). We’ve been using metadata with video for a while now and we’ve really enjoyed the abilities that come with it, but with something so universal, opening it up to the world comes serious questions, mainly, “Is it okay to extend the JPEG standard?” That’s kinda where the post ends, after raising some grey area questions therein, but it’s a cool, new thing to think about, eh?