FlashPix

» see flashpix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 1995 Eastman Kodak went looking for a better way to handle big images on small machines, with Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard alongside it. What they found was that a California company called Live Picture already had the answer in its IVUE format, so the four of them turned themselves into a consortium. The specification they published carries the date 11 September 1996 on its cover and a Kodak copyright line underneath. The extension was .fpx.

The idea inside it was good and is still the idea everyone uses. A FlashPix file does not hold one image, it holds a stack: the picture at full resolution, then the same picture at half, then half again, repeating until the whole thing fits in a single tile. Each level is cut into tiles of sixty four pixels square. An application that only needs a screen-sized view reads a few small tiles out of the middle of the file and never touches the enormous layer at the bottom.

That is roughly how every map tile and every zoomable museum scan works now. In 1996 it was being proposed for the ordinary photograph on an ordinary desktop, and the cost showed up immediately in the file size, because storing every resolution means storing the picture something like one and a third times over before compression and a good deal more than that in practice. For a format aimed at consumers with a 1996 hard drive, the argument stopped right there.

The other problem was the shape of the container. FlashPix was built on Microsoft's structured storage, the compound document format that holds a Word file, so an .fpx was a small filesystem of streams and sub-storages rather than a header followed by pixels. Writing a correct reader was a project. Writing a JPEG reader was an afternoon.

~ the record ~

~ what it was for ~

The consortium was not only after a file format. Alongside it came the Internet Imaging Protocol, a way for a server to hand out individual FlashPix tiles over HTTP so a browser could pan and zoom around an image far too large to download. In 1997 that was a serious proposition for catalogs and for anything else where the picture was bigger than the pipe.

Kodak pushed hardest. It made FlashPix a native format on some of its late-1990s digital cameras, and the major image editors added support, Photoshop among them. For about three years the format had everything a format is supposed to need, which is four large backers, shipping hardware, a published specification and a test suite.

I spend my working days on computer vision, where the choice of image format is a decision you make before anything else and then live with for years. I have never once opened an .fpx, and I had to look up what the extension stood for before writing this.

~ the funny part ~

The format's owner kept changing hands without the format going anywhere. The Digital Imaging Group held the FlashPix trademark and the test suite, then merged with the Photographic and Imaging Manufacturers Association in 2001 to become I3A. I3A handed its ANSI and ISO photographic standards to the Society for Imaging Science and Technology in January 2011, handed camera-phone image quality to the IEEE, and had disbanded by October 2013. FlashPix was in the room for all of that and nobody was using it for any of it.

Pieces survive in places you would not look for them. ImageMagick still ships libfpx, an open toolkit assembled from code the Digital Imaging Group and Kodak released in 1999, so a modern Linux box can usually still read the thing. ExifTool still carries a full FlashPix tag table, because cameras wrote FlashPix-structured metadata blocks into perfectly ordinary JPEG files, and those blocks are still sitting inside photographs people took twenty years ago. And flashpix.com, which served a small real page until February 2001, has been a few hundred bytes of parking ever since.

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