Seattle FilmWorks

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File Format
Name Seattle FilmWorks
Ontology
Extension(s) .sfw, .pwp, .pwm, .alb, .#??
PRONOM fmt/1104
Released ~1994
Seattle FilmWorks, later renamed PhotoWorks, was a mail order film processing company. Digitized photographs made by the company used a family of proprietary raster image formats known as SFW and PWP (PhotoWorks PhotoMail). The most common formats are based on JPEG, and can be converted to JPEG format without further loss of image quality.

There are at least three different SFW formats, and one PWP format. The are also at least two other related formats that don't directly contain images: .pwm and .alb.

By 2003 PhotoWorks stopped using the SFW format.[1]

Contents

Formats

Format Signature Notes
"SFW93A" SFW, .#?? SFW93A Used briefly, up to sometime in 1994. File extension may be .#??, where ?? is the picture number from the camera roll.
"SFW94A" SFW, compressed SFW94A Based on JPEG. The most widely supported format.
"SFW94A" SFW, uncompressed Based on BMP.
.pwm Not an image format.
PWP SFW95B Container format for multiple SFW images.
"SFW98A" SFW SFW98A Based on JPEG with arithmetic coding. Caution: Some utilities reportedly extract only the thumbnail image.
.alb SFW_ALB Not an image format.

Identification

Files begin with an ASCII signature (see the Formats section), but it's not always sufficient to determine the specific format.

The sfwwhichfmt.c utility listed in the Software section below may be helpful.

Screenshots

Photoworks2.41-OpenDialog.png

Software

Links

Sample files

References

  1. https://web.archive.org/web/20030403194535/http://www.photoworks.com/Support/FAQs/Default.aspx?FAQ=POD
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