/Images

How Are Images Really Stored?

- Moncef Abboud tl;dr: “This post is me indulging in a rabbit hole. I somehow found myself thinking about images, probably after my recent exploration of some compression schemes. It’s common knowledge that images are either grayscale or RGB, that mixing red, green, and blue creates new colors. But there’s certainly more to storing an image than just aligning three-byte RGB values. Something about that idea piqued my curiosity, so this blog post is my attempt to scratch that itch and answer the question: how are images really stored?”

featured in #587


The World's Smallest PNG

- Evan Hahn tl;dr: This post describes this file in more detail and tries to explain how PNGs work along the way. The smallest PNG file has four sections: (1) The PNG signature, the same for every PNG: 8 bytes. (2) The image’s metadata, which includes its dimensions: 25 bytes. (3) The image’s pixel data: 22 bytes. (4) An “end of image” marker: 12 bytes.  

featured in #477