Re: EXIF support in PNG

Cosmin Truta <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.graphics.png.general
Message-ID <CAAoVtZwD_aGbEbygLOScAD1CSwsG0t3vtRvR=1H8fWVBFHaQEw@mail.gmail.com>
Glenn Randers-Pehrson wrote:
> How about always having the compression_method byte
>
>     0: zlib compression
>     1: uncompressed
>
> Cameras could use 1 for encoding speed, optimizers could
> compress the data and set it to 0 afterwards.

I agree with Glenn's rationale, but I'd like to make it consistent
with the existing PNG practice, e.g. as in iTXt.

Chunk length: 4 bytes: 4 + 2 + N
Chunk type: 4 bytes: "eXIf"
Chunk data:
* Offset 0: 1 byte: compression flag
==> 0 for uncompressed, 1 for compressed, >1 is invalid
* Offset 1: 1 byte: compression method
==> 0 for zlib datastream with deflate compression
* Offset 2: N bytes: the EXIF blob

My proposal takes one extra byte, but it allows correct PNG format
expansion, if at any time in the future one or more more compression
methods get added (besides just deflate, which is compression method
number zero).

Sincerely,
Cosmin

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