Re: images that play nicely with revision control?
On Sun, Feb 09, 2014 at 12:28:45PM +0000, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> I'm looking for a file format for images that plays nicely with revision
> control. Ideally I'd like to edit them while seeing what I'm editing,
> whether it's a line drawing (like inkscape) or a pixel map.
>
I think that doesn't exist. At least not for all kind of images.
SVG is basically an XML file. There you can at least compare the xml
content. But that however is also very tricky, you might need something
which converts it first into canonical xml and the compare/store it.
But that is only efficient for vector images. For bitmap images that
wouldn't work.
> And I'd like to keep the whole thing under revision control (like
> monotone, or git, or such. Currently I use monotone).
>
> But any kind of compressed file format is probably not going to cut it.
> Revision control seems to be designed for program text, with lots of
> newlines in stable places.
>
> If all else fails, and I get desperate I could even store my images as
> programs in, say, Scheme or C or some such, and run the code to see the
> image. But that would make editing difficult. And in that case, I'd
> like recommendations to graphics libraries that can output to a variety
> of formats, such as onto the screen, into a jpeg file, to svg or html
> format, or some such.
>
That approach is close to what adobe does. They basically have a master
image. They store with that image every change. That is how Lightroom
handles changes. This of course can be very demanding on cpu/gpu. Because
everytime you load the picture you have to apply all the changes to the
master, render it and display it.
> I would definitely prefer not to write a whole new image editor from
> scratch.
-H
--
Henning Follmann | hfollmann@itcfollmann.com
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