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Comment by freestorage

4 years ago

Years ago when Amazon had unlimited photo storage, you could “hide” gigabytes of data behind a 1px gif (literally concatenation together) so that it wouldn’t count against your quota.

6 comments

freestorage

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xhrpost  4 years ago

They still do if you pay for Prime. I was surprised to see that even RAW files (which are uncompressed and quite large) were uploaded and stored with no issues. Not the same as "hiding" data but might still be possible.

  • karamanolev  4 years ago

    In the interest of technical correctness, RAW files are frequently compressed and even lossily compressed. For example, Sony's RAW compression was only lossy until very recent cameras.

    Given that there are the options for uncompressed, lossy compressed and lossless compressed, I'd say RAW files differ in the stage of the data processing where capture is being done and doesn't imply anything about the type of compression.

    What is relevant is that the formats vary widely between manufacturers, camera lines and individual cameras, so unlike JPEG, it's really hard to create a storage service that compresses RAW files further after uploading in a meaningful way. So anything they do needs to losslessly compress the file.

    • xhrpost  4 years ago

      Interesting, so are you saying that the RAW signal coming from the hardware is already often compressed even before hitting the main software compression?

      1 reply →

  • netsharc  4 years ago

    I guess you can store 24 bits of data as the R,G and B components of a pixel of an "image", and store it as a lossless image...