SRW

Samsung discontinued its NX camera line and exited the standalone camera market, so there is no active vendor maintaining raw-decoder compatibility going forward, making SRW one of the more clearly at-risk formats for long-term DAM support.

No longer maintained. Samsung bundled a rebadged Silkypix Developer engine with NX cameras as its own RAW/SRW converter, but after Samsung exited the standalone camera business around 2015-2016 and discontinued the NX line, that software stopped receiving updates and is no longer distributed through official channels. Any copy still running today is unsupported legacy software with no compatibility guarantees for newer operating systems, so archives relying on it should not treat it as a durable long-term dependency.

Convert SRW masters to DNG while active third-party support still exists, rather than keeping them raw indefinitely. Adobe Camera Raw/Lightroom Classic, RawTherapee and darktable (via libraw) currently decode SRW reliably, but with Samsung gone from the camera market, that support is maintained by the open-source and Adobe ecosystems rather than the format's original vendor. Migrating now, while multiple independent decoders still agree on interpretation, is safer than waiting until support narrows to a single tool.

SRW is a TIFF/EXIF-based container, not a bespoke binary format. The full-resolution Bayer sensor data sits in a sub-IFD nested inside the first TIFF IFD, alongside Samsung maker-note metadata, a thumbnail, and - notably - a complete full-resolution embedded JPEG preview, so an SRW file effectively bundles a JPEG and a RAW together. Early NX models store raw samples as uncompressed, big-endian, packed 12-bit values; some later NX bodies needed an updated decoder (LibRaw's Samsung v3 decoder) to read correctly.

SRW debuted in 2010 alongside the Samsung NX10, the company's first NX-series mirrorless camera and its entry into APS-C mirrorless systems. It remained Samsung's raw format across the NX line's roughly five-year lifespan, through models like the NX1 and NX500, until Samsung wound down NX production and exited the standalone camera business around 2015-2016, leaving SRW without further first-party camera releases to extend its use.

Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom Classic support SRW directly, as do the open-source raw processors RawTherapee and darktable, both built on the libraw decoding library. libraw itself can also be used standalone or embedded in other software. Coverage spans the NX camera range, though some newer bodies needed a decoder update (LibRaw's Samsung v3 decoder, which addressed files such as the NX500) to read correctly, so current libraw/ACR versions are worth confirming before relying on older toolchains.

It can still technically run on some systems, but it is unsupported, unmaintained legacy software - a rebadged Silkypix Developer build Samsung bundled with NX cameras and stopped updating once it exited the camera business. It was never guaranteed to work on current operating systems, receives no security or compatibility patches, and depending on it for an active archive workflow is riskier than using presently maintained tools like Adobe's converters or libraw-based applications.

Adobe DNG Converter is the standard batch path: point it at a folder tree of SRW masters and it processes them in bulk into DNG, preserving the raw sensor data while standardizing the container into a widely supported, vendor-neutral format. For a large legacy NX collection, this converts the whole archive in one pass without touching Samsung's discontinued software, and the resulting DNGs stay readable by Adobe tools, RawTherapee, and darktable long after any single decoder's SRW support might lapse.