Is DjVu a good format for storing and organizing photo collections?

Question

I need to organize many photos into albums or packages. I’ve been putting them into ZIP/CBZ files, but I’m wondering if DjVu would be a better format for storing sets of photographs. Is DjVu suitable for photo collections, or is there a better way to organize and archive them?

user1943 · Answer

That seems terrible to me. Djvu is a format designed for scanned documents, not for photographs. It has features that are great for that — like separation of text from the background — but which are useless for photographs. And it doesn't have any particular features which make it good for photography. It uses a wavelet compression algorithm, which is generally good and probably better than that used for JPEG, but if your photos are already JPEGs then you're just introducing double compression artifacts. The only reason to do this would be if space is at a premium over quality.

I think your reasonable options are:

Store in a filesystem with subdirectories.
Use a program with photograph cataloging features, like Adobe Lightroom.
Use a sophisticated digital content management system like Dspace.

You could use archive files like zip, but I don't see any particular advantage in doing so unless you need to give them to other people on a regular basis.

Is DjVu a good format for storing and organizing photo collections?

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