David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

The File Format Factor

iPhoto and Picasa can't import digital pictures unless they understand the photos' file formats, but that rarely poses a problem. Every digital camera on earth can save its photos as JPEG, TIFF, or RAW files; both photo programs handle these formats beautifully. (JPEG is the world's most popular file format for photos, because even though it's compressed to occupy a lot less disk space, the visual quality is still very high. The terms JPEG, JFIF, JPEG JFIF, and JPEG 2000 all mean the same thing.)

In fact, they can handle other graphics formats, too, like BMP, Photoshop, PNG, and GIF. Good to know if you want iPhoto and Picasa to manage a bunch of other graphic stuff from your hard drive.

Note

Not every camera offers an option to save your files in RAW format (RAW or JPEG?). And among those that do, not all are iPhoto/Picasa compatible. Why are only some cameras compatible? Because RAW is a concept, not a file format. Each camera company stores its photo data in a different way, so in fact there are dozens of different file formats in the RAW world. Programs like iPhoto and Picasa must be upgraded periodically to accommodate new camera models' emerging flavors of RAW.

Movies

In addition to still photos, compact cameras (and even a few SLRs) can also capture digital movies. These are no longer jittery, silent affairs the size of a Wheat Thin; modern cameras capture full-blown, 30-frames-per-second, fill-your-screen movies—even high-definition movies.

Movies eat up ...