jfif

Why would anyone save images as jfif instead of jpeg?

I was rummaging around an artist’s website, and noticed a lot of their images were jfif and not jpeg. I get that jfif incorporates some metadata stuff not found in jpeg, but I don’t understand what advantage there is in the real world. Happily, all you need to do is change the extension to jpg and you’re good to go.

I've never heard of it. That makes me an old, right? Those kids and their new file extensions.

Never heard of it either.

Colorspace metadata couldn’t hurt.

Sure (he said, after looking up what a JFIF was), that format can be useful. But not widely useful, nor particularly practical for sharing.

If I’m going to save an image, and I want to save all of it, I’ll use some very large but effectively “complete” format, such as a RAW format, or TIFF. When I want to share it, I’ll use any of a number of tools to render the image in a way that is both accessible and that shows the image in the way I want (color corrections, specific colorspaces, etc.).

It really sounds like JFIF is a solution in search of a problem, or a tool that does something in essentially a completely new (but not necessarily better) way - well after other tools have established themselves as standards.