PNG Is Back in the Spotlight: Exciting New Features After 20 Years!

ByPetar Petkovski

After more than two decades of relative stagnation, the popular PNG image format is experiencing a true renaissance! With support from industry giants like Adobe, Apple, Google, BBC, and the W3C, the PNG standard is gaining powerful new features that make it even more competitive and relevant for today’s digital world.

What’s New in PNG?

HDR (High Dynamic Range) Support

PNG now enables true HDR images, offering a wider color gamut and improved brightness—ushering in a new era for photography and video. This HDR support is implemented efficiently, requiring just 4 bytes plus the standard PNG overhead.

Animated PNG (APNG)

While animated PNGs were originally introduced by Mozilla years ago, the specification now officially recognizes them. This means PNG animations are now natively supported in all modern browsers and image tools.

Exif Metadata

PNG finally gets official support for Exif metadata, allowing images to store copyright info, camera details, GPS location, and much more—just like JPEG.

General Updates and Improvements

The specification has been cleaned up, removing old ambiguities and errors, and introducing other small enhancements for greater stability and compatibility.

Why Is This Important?

PNG is the recommended format by institutions like the Library of Congress (USA), Library and Archives Canada, and the National Archives of Australia. With these upgrades, PNG remains modern, relevant, and fully compatible with the latest technologies.

Already Supported in Popular Tools

These new features are already available in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS/macOS, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, and many more. Expect even broader support soon in hardware and professional image/video editing tools.

What’s Next?

The working group is already focusing on future versions: improving compression and enabling parallel encoding/decoding. The next (fourth) version will bring even better HDR/SDR interoperability, followed by a focus on even more efficient compression.

PNG is back in the game—with new energy and ready for the future of digital photography and design!

Source: Programmax.net – PNG is Back