The general recommendation to record original scanned images used to be "use TIFF". But programmers need evolution of format for "evolution of software", and I need to evolve my system to change from TIFF to JP2.
I have a big image storage (terabytes) for legal and scientific scanned materials, they need original recording. I use some caching rules, but the system need to show (via web download) or to manipulate (ImageMagick and others) original data.
I've read an article about migrating image storages from TIFF-lossless to JPEG-2000-lossless and the conclusion is to stay with TIFF. However the article is from 2009 and at the time they found support for the JPEG-2000 format by available software was very poor. The conversions to JPEG-2000 were lossy in the software they tested, and the available software for consuming images did not support the format well.
Is now the time to change from TIFF to JP2, or not? Is the software support still as flawed as it was in 2009?
Best Answer
Based on Wikipedia's list of applications, support these days looks pretty good. It is also gaining traction in archive-oriented organizations worldwide:
Here's a page discussing its adoption by NATO, among others.
This paper mentions that the Harvard University Library is moving to JPEG-2000 as well.
This paper goes into detail on the British Museum and Harvard efforts, and adds the Wellcome Digital Library.
On my MacBook Pro running 10.7.5, here are some browser results (source 1, source 2):
Safari: no trouble
Chrome: sometimes needed to load QuickTime
Firefox: no trouble
I didn't test IE, but from those three, and the Wikipedia list, I think JPEG-2000 support is now widespread.
Regarding the issue of whether you should switch, since JPEG-2000 appears to have sufficient platform support now, I would switch only if there are strong technical reasons for doing so:
smaller image sizes
faster performance
more secure
TIFF is starting to be unsupported.
If you choose to switch, please post back with your experiences in doing so!