Home > Technology > CD-ROM > Photo CD Formats

Photo CD  and Picture CD Photo CD and Picture CD were both developed to store photos on CD-ROM or CD-R.

Kodak developed both Photo CD and Picture CD for storing photos from film on CD-ROM or CD-R.  Photo CD was intended to provide consumers with a way to digitise their films, but Picture CD and digital photography have replaced Photo CD for consumer applications at least.

Photo CD

Kodak announced Photo CD in 1990 and launched it in the summer of 1992. Photo CD discs contain photographic images in a range of image resolutions to suit a wide variety of applications. See also Photo CD Image Pacs below.

Photo CD discs conform to the CD-ROM XA and CD-i Bridge specifications and are intended to play on CD-i players, Photo CD players and other hardware with suitable software.

The following table lists the five different Photo CD formats available each supporting different applications.

Photo CD Master

One Photo CD Master disc can hold about 100 high-resolution images, or four 24- exposure rolls of 35mm film. These discs can be Orange Book multi-session CD-Rs allowing photos to be recorded to the disc in more than one session.  The discs offer image resolutions from thumbnails (to facilitate selecting the required picture for viewing) up to 2048 x 3072 pixels used for making prints.

Pro Photo CD Master

This is used by professionals to store images from the larger film formats including 120, 70 mm, and 4 x 5-inch, as well as 35 mm. Pro Photo CD includes Base*64 (4096 x 6144 pixels) to the resolutions stored on a Photo CD Master disc. The Pro disc format also offers security features such as ownership and copyright notices.

Photo CD Portfolio

The Portfolio system allows interactive sound-and-picture presentations to be created for playback on TV or computers. Because the highest resolutions are not required on this format, users have more space available for other content, such as audio and graphics.

A Portfolio disc can be played on a Photo CD player, a CD-i player or a computer equipped with a CD ROM drive and suitable Software.

Photo CD Catalogue

This is designed for organisations that want to store large numbers (up to 6,000) of images on a disc and distribute these images widely, such as mail-order retailers, tourism associations, or art galleries. The low resolution images cannot be used to make photo-quality prints.

Print Photo CD

Print Photo CD has been optimised for customers in the printing industry and allows three kinds of image data:

• 16*base Photo CD Image Pac files (see Image Pacs) accessible in the same way as conventional Photo CD images.
• Platform-independent CMYK format based on the TIFF/IT file to allow graphics files to be easily shared among systems from different manufacturers
• Vendor-specific data to allow Print Photo CD discs to accommodate all the resources necessary for production.

Photo CD Image Pacs

Images are stored using the PhotoYCC encoding format, developed by Kodak, which stores data at up to six levels of resolution in Image Pac files.

Picture CD

Picture CD is an alternative format to Photo CD for consumers.  The format does not include as many resolutions or options as Photo CD, but is used for storing photos which have been scanned from film following processing.

The following table compares Photo CD and Picture CD.

	Picture CD	Photo CD
Application	pictures from film with a PC	high-quality professional and commercial
Resolution	1024 x 1536	128 x 192 up to 2048 x 3072
File format	JPEG	Image Pac
Quantity	Single roll of film	Multiple films up to 100 images
Film type	APS or 35 mm	35 mm to 4 x 5
Hardware	PCs, Macs, some DVD players*	PCs, Macs, Photo CD players, CD-i players

* An increasing number of DVD players will read and display JPEG photos from a CD-ROM or CD-R disc as a slideshow.  This includes not just Picture CDs but any CD that contains JPEG images.