PNG

Action Plan: Portable Network Graphics (PNG) 

Last Updated 4/14/2014

Description:   PNG is a widely supported lossless data compression raster image format. It was developed and released in 1996 as an open format replacement for the GIF format, which at the time was patented by Unisys. It does not however have any animation capabilities. This resulted in the development of APNG animation extension by Mozilla in the mid-2000s. APNG was however rejected by the PNG group in 2007 and support remains minimal.



Codec:  The current version is 1.2 with minimal changes having been made since publication.



<span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;border:1ptnonewindowtext;padding:0in;">Software:   <span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">Adobe Photoshop <span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black;border:1ptnonewindowtext;padding:0in;">,  <span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">MS Paint <span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black;border:1ptnonewindowtext;padding:0in;"> ,  <span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">Gimp <span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black;border:1ptnonewindowtext;padding:0in;">,  <span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">Aperture <span style="font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;color:black;border:1ptnonewindowtext;padding:0in;"> (OS X), Almost all image editing suites .

<p style="margin:0in0in0.0001pt;line-height:16.5pt;background-position:initialinitial;background-repeat:initialinitial;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<p style="margin:0in0in0.0001pt;line-height:16.5pt;background-position:initialinitial;background-repeat:initialinitial;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;border:1ptnonewindowtext;padding:0in;">Long Term Preservation Plan:   <span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">The PNG format is open, widely adopted and well documented. It is the #3 preferred digital raster image format in the "Library of Congress - Recommended Format Specifications" list after uncompressed TIFF and JPEG2000. It has been adopted by the National Archives of Australia as their preferred master image format. It is supported by all major browsers, although there have been numerous compatibility issues with various versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. PNG files should be retained. If uncompressed TIFF and JPEG2000 versions are unavailable, library divisions should request PNG files at ingest.

<p style="margin:0in0in0.0001pt;line-height:16.5pt;background-position:initialinitial;background-repeat:initialinitial;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<p style="margin:0in0in0.0001pt;line-height:16.5pt;background-position:initialinitial;background-repeat:initialinitial;"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;border:1ptnonewindowtext;padding:0in;">Division Specific Notes:  <span style="font-size:10.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;">