lossless compression of still images - recommendations?

[Bill]

On 02/17/2017 01:48 PM, Dave Stevens wrote:
> I'm making a long series of exposures of a landscape where there will be
> only very small (but potentially significant) changes from frame to
> frame. Basically I'll take a 5MP image every 5 seconds for a year, I'll
> want to timestamp the images and keep them all for later
> post-processing, as well as being able to retrieve the image closest in
> time to a specified time and date of interest (which I can't predict.)
>
> I want the retrieved image to be faithful to the original, so I'd like
> to minimize storage needs by compressing the mostly unchanging parts
> (the landscape won't be moving much.)
>
> Does anyone have a recommendation for a program to do this?
>
>
WS=> It depends.  Are you thinking of compression done by the camera or 
after the camera downloads the image to the computer.

If you want really preserve EVERYTHING, set your camera to save the 
images as RAW.  The drawback to saving in RAW is that the image saved is 
HUGE!   By default, most cameras save images in JPG format.  Saving in 
JPG compression format results in a significant savings in size but it 
is not lossless.   Your camera might be able to save images in PNG 
format which results in a somewhat larger image than JPG but is largely 
lossless.

If you are going to have your computer do the compression then download 
the image in RAW format and then try for the best compression scheme 
that the computer is capable of.  Unfortunately, I am not an expert an 
computer based compression of images.