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Saturday, July 14, 2012

Family History Through the Alphabet – J is for …file types

I have a rudimentary knowledge of file extensions, those (mostly) little three letter codes that append themselves to the end of our file names to indicate what type of files they are, or, as a dictionary says " The portion of a filename, following the final point, which indicates the kind of data stored in the file."  

I know that my family history files contain items with a number of  different extensions. Some of the ones in my collection are:

.avi   Audio Vidio Interleave
.csv  Comma Separated Values 
.doc  Microsoft Word Document
.ged  Gedcom Genealogy Data 
.html  Hypertext Markup Language
.mp3  MP3 Audio
.mp4  MP4 Video
.pdf  Portable Document File
.png  Portable Network Graphic
.ppt   Powerpoint Presentation
.rtf    Rich Text Format
.tif    Tagged Image File
.xls   Excel Spreadsheet
.zip   Zipped File

The files bearing these extensions document my genealogy Journey.

My favourite file extension that is on over 90,000 of my files is: 
.jpg  JPEG Image 

What is the extension of your favourite file format?
 

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5 comments:

  1. FiJuly 14, 2012 at 11:34 AM

    Another vote for JPEG

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kerryn TaylorJuly 14, 2012 at 4:43 PM

    have to agree, JPEG wins hands down.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jerry KocisJuly 15, 2012 at 2:03 AM

    An awareness of these file types can be very useful. For instance, in a Google search, the filetype operator is used to restrict the results to a specified type of file. To search for pdf documents related to barbeque enter 'filetype:pdf barbeque' (without the quotes) into the search field. Only results with pdf documents will be returned.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Gould GenealogyJuly 15, 2012 at 4:54 PM

    I'll second (or is that 3rd that) for JPEG.

    As for knowing file extensions, I believe it is important for everyone to know. And I've had to learn all of them for the various genealogy programs use, so as to be able advise and talk customers through queries.

    ReplyDelete
  5. SharonJuly 15, 2012 at 5:25 PM

    90,000!!!!!!!! WOW. I thought that 12,000 was a lot but not anymore! You must have huge storage capacity.
    Lately, I have taken to printing webpages/emails etc to PDF and saving on my computer, rather than having bits of paper everywhere.

    ReplyDelete

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