OpenRAW

I value the long term archival of the data within my RAW files. I use a Minolta A1 and foresee my owning of other brands of digital cameras employing RAW formats. I wish to be able to continue accessing the original RAW data from these image files 10, 20, or even 30+ years from now.

The trend I have seen time and time again in the computer field is that of abandonment. File formats are abandoned, leaving people who have thousands of files in said formats to beg and plead for something to read the files and save them to a less precise format or outright give them up due to lack of tools.

This is an outrage.

My current tools for converting RAW image files include Adobe Photoshop Elements 2(with RAW support) and the open source program dcraw.c to perform interpretations of my RAW data.

The means to extract better data out of existing RAW files gets better each year. I do not want to be forced to perform a one time conversion now to say 16bit Tiff only to find that 10 years from now, there might be a better algorithm to handle sensor data, but I have no way of reading my RAW files to produce a new image.

Please form an Open RAW file standard!
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