JPEG - JPEG Files

JPEG Files

The file format known as "JPEG Interchange Format" (JIF) is specified in Annex B of the standard. However, this "pure" file format is rarely used, primarily because of the difficulty of programming encoders and decoders that fully implement all aspects of the standard and because of certain shortcomings of the standard:

• Color space definition
• Component sub-sampling registration
• Pixel aspect ratio definition.

Several additional standards have evolved to address these issues. The first of these, released in 1992, was JPEG File Interchange Format (or JFIF), followed in recent years by Exchangeable image file format (Exif) and ICC color profiles. Both of these formats use the actual JIF byte layout, consisting of different markers, but in addition employ one of the JIF standard's extension points, namely the application markers: JFIF use APP0, while Exif use APP1. Within these segments of the file, that were left for future use in the JIF standard and aren't read by it, these standards add specific metadata.

Thus, in some ways JFIF is a cutdown version of the JIF standard in that it specifies certain constraints (such as not allowing all the different encoding modes), while in other ways it is an extension of JIF due to the added metadata. The documentation for the original JFIF standard states:

JPEG File Interchange Format is a minimal file format which enables JPEG bitstreams to be exchanged between a wide variety of platforms and applications. This minimal format does not include any of the advanced features found in the TIFF JPEG specification or any application specific file format. Nor should it, for the only purpose of this simplified format is to allow the exchange of JPEG compressed images.

Image files that employ JPEG compression are commonly called "JPEG files", and are stored in variants of the JIF image format. Most image capture devices (such as digital cameras) that output JPEG are actually creating files in the Exif format, the format that the camera industry has standardized on for metadata interchange. On the other hand, since the Exif standard does not allow color profiles, most image editing software stores JPEG in JFIF format, and also include the APP1 segment from the Exif file to include the metadata in an almost-compliant way; the JFIF standard is interpreted somewhat flexibly.

Strictly speaking, the JFIF and Exif standards are incompatible because they each specify that their marker segment (APP0 or APP1, respectively) appears first. In practice, most JPEG files contain a JFIF marker segment that precedes the Exif header. This allows older readers to correctly handle the older format JFIF segment, while newer readers also decode the following Exif segment, being less strict about requiring it to appear first.