OpenRAW - Digital Image Preservation Through Open Documentation

I don't know how much the photographer folk who read this are up on this sort of thing - but I figured this was worth spreading a bit further around.

The RAW image format (used by higher end cameras to capture photographic images in a loss-less format unlike jpeg), isn't an open format as such - what standards there are are more a matter of convention. As such, camera companies can interpret RAW any way they like, and use their own unique dialects of it. This may mean that you can only open your RAW images with their application, rather than your tool of choice. For now, this isn't a problem - but what about some time in the future, when they stop supporting that 5 year old RAW dialect they created, or they go out of business, or RAW is replaced by something better.

If you can't get at your images, in all their RAW glory, they might as well have been lost.

OpenRAW is:

a Working Group of photographers and other people interested in advocating the open documentation of Digital Camera RAW files.


We want camera manufacturers to publicly document their RAW image formats - past, present, and future. The goal of OpenRAW is to encourage image preservation and give creative choice of how images are processed to the creators of the images. To this end, we advocate open documentation of information about how the raw data and camera settings selected by the photographer are stored.

Already, Nikon and Canon are encrypting some of the information in the RAW images that you take on your camera.

This isn't about some ideological 'information must be free" stance, nor is it about trying to get the rights to use something without paying for it. It's about keeping the rights to view and use the photographs that you take, without having to down-sample them to a more open format for archiving. It's about your rights, to do what you will with content (images) that you've created, and not be limited in that by the attempts at proprietary lock in of the large, camera making corporations.

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