PNGbased

PNGbased is a term used to describe a family of techniques and software practices that use the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) file format as a core data representation container. It is not an official standard, but rather a concept employed in research, tooling, and some production workflows to treat PNG files as self-contained containers for both image data and ancillary information.

The central idea of PNGbased is to leverage the PNG file structure, including its chunks such as IHDR, IDAT, and ancillary chunks (tEXt, zTXt, iTXt), to store payload alongside or within the image data. In practice, payloads may be embedded in textual metadata chunks or distributed across image data streams in a manner designed to preserve lossless fidelity. The approach emphasizes compatibility with existing PNG tooling while enabling additional metadata, licensing, provenance, or auxiliary resources to travel with the image.

Common use cases include data packaging for web-ready assets, embedding descriptive metadata in a single file, or creating self-describing assets for distribution where multiple related resources would otherwise require separate files. PNGbased aims to provide portability and transparency, since the core image data remains in a widely supported format and can be viewed by standard image viewers, while the embedded data is accessible to specialized tooling.

Limitations of the approach include potential increases in file size, inconsistent support across software that ignores unknown chunks, and the lack of a unified, governing specification. PNGbased remains largely a niche concept and is typically explored in experimental or specialised workflows. See also: PNG, metadata in image formats, data packaging, image steganography.