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
Common use cases include data packaging for web-ready assets, embedding descriptive metadata in a single file,
Limitations of the approach include potential increases in file size, inconsistent support across software that ignores