ART is a proprietary

image file format An Image file format is a file format for a digital image. There are many formats that can be used, such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Most formats up until 2022 were for storing 2D images, not 3D ones. The data stored in an image file format may be ...

used mostly by the

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(AOL) service and

client Client(s) or The Client may refer to: * Client (business) * Client (computing), hardware or software that accesses a remote service on another computer * Customer or client, a recipient of goods or services in return for monetary or other valuabl ...

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Technical details

The ART format (

file extension A filename extension, file name extension or file extension is a suffix to the name of a computer file (e.g., .txt, .docx, .md). The extension indicates a characteristic of the file contents or its intended use. A filename extension is typically ...

".art") holds a single still

image An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensio ...

that has been highly compressed. The format was designed to facilitate the quick downloading of images, among other things. Originally, the compression was developed by the Johnson-Grace Company, which was then acquired by AOL. When an image is converted to the ART format, the image is analyzed and the software decides what compression technique would be best. The ART format has similarities to the progressive

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and im ...

format, and certain attributes of the ART format can lead to image quality being sacrificed for the sake of image compression (for instance, the image's color palette can be limited).

Usage by AOL

The AOL service used the ART image format for most of the image presentation of the online service. In addition, the AOL client's web browser also automatically served such images in the ART format to achieve faster downloads on the slower dialup connections that were prevalent in those days. This conversion was done in the AOL

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and could be optionally disabled by the user. This image conversion process effectively reduced the download time for image files. This technology was once

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ed as Turboweb and is now known as AOL TopSpeed.

Software support for ART

The Graphic Workshop Professional software from Alchemy Mindworks Corp. supports ART files. (With later versions of the Graphic Workshop Professional software, an ART plugin from Alchemy Mindworks is required for this support.) For the

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platform,

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released the AOL Image Support Update which added support for ART images. As of June 2006 the

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

browser no longer supported ART files when Microsoft released a security update. Among other things, this update removed support for ART files from the Internet Explorer browser in order to help prevent issues where invalid ART data could cause the Internet Explorer software to unexpectedly quit. An ART file that is opened with the AOL picture viewer can be saved as another file type. Software Mfg. Delcam (a subsidiary of Autodesk) has a product called Artcam which uses the ART file extension to create CAD/CAM files.

References

External links

"Profile - Irving Reed"
An article with information on the history of Johnson-Grace and the ART image compression.--> * Data compression using adaptive bit allocation and hybrid lossless entropy coding * Optimal spline interpolation for image compression * Method and apparatus for compressing images {{AOL Inc. AOL Graphics file formats