.sfw

Overview

.sfw was a proprietary file format was used by Seattle FilmWorks for the first version (circa 1994-1995) of their photo-digitizing service. The files were provided on 1.44 megabyte 3.5-inch diskettes, along with a viewer program which ran under an early version of Microsoft Windows (presumably a 16-bit version; it does not appear to work under Windows 98).

Although the format is proprietary, the encoding algorithm used is actually JPEG, which is an open format. Consequently, free 3rd-party tools are available which can read this format.

Links

Software

• SFW official information:
  • Image Conversion/Pictures on Disk Software: SFW's official tools (free); also lists some 3rd-party tools
• SFWJPG - free/open source 3rd-party command-line utility for losslessly converting .SFW files to JPEG format:
  • Linux (provided as source code, with compiling instructions)
  • Windows (executable binary)