PNG

PNG exists because of a licensing dispute, not a technical shortfall in GIF’s image quality. In late 1994 Unisys announced it would enforce its patent on the LZW compression algorithm used inside GIF, prompting an independent PNG Development Group to design a royalty-free, technically improved lossless replacement built on the unpatented DEFLATE algorithm. The specification froze in early 1995, and PNG became a W3C Recommendation on October 1, 1996 — with a Third Edition in June 2025 adding animation (APNG), HDR support, and a formal EXIF chunk to the core standard.

In a DAM, PNG is the default choice whenever lossless fidelity or alpha-channel transparency matters more than file size: logos, icons, UI assets, screenshots, and diagrams typically live and get previewed as PNG rather than JPEG, since JPEG’s compression artifacts and lack of transparency would be unacceptable for that content. Because DEFLATE compression is lossless, PNG derivatives can be regenerated repeatedly without generation loss, which makes it a safe intermediate format in editing pipelines.

The recurring pitfall for DAM ingestion is metadata poverty: even though the PNG spec has supported XMP for years and gained a formal EXIF chunk only in 2025, most PNG-producing tools — browsers, screenshot utilities, many older editors — still don’t embed it by default. A DAM that expects to auto-populate search fields the way it does from JPEG camera files will often find PNGs arriving metadata-empty, so PNG assets frequently depend more heavily on manual tagging or filename-based ingestion rules than on embedded metadata extraction.