Which file format do the flower stock photos come in?

Files are delivered as JPEG, RGB, in the sRGB colour space, at a quality level chosen so that compression artefacts are invisible at full magnification.

Why JPEG

It opens everywhere, it carries an embedded colour profile, and at high quality it is visually indistinguishable from a lossless format at a fraction of the size. For photographic material with continuous tone, which is all of this catalogue, that trade is the right one.

The two formats people sometimes ask for instead are worth addressing directly. TIFF is larger with no visible benefit once the file has been through a single encode. PNG is designed for graphics with flat colour and hard edges; on a photograph it produces an enormous file and no improvement at all.

Why sRGB

sRGB is the assumption every browser, phone and social platform makes about an image that arrives without a profile. Delivering in a wider space such as Adobe RGB looks better in Photoshop and worse everywhere else, because the extra saturation is silently clipped by software that does not read the profile.

Flowers are the subject where this bites hardest. Saturated magentas, deep reds and violet blues sit near or outside the edge of sRGB, and a magenta that is out of gamut turns into a flat, detail-free patch when it is converted carelessly.

Converting for print

If your printer asks for CMYK, convert once, at the end, with a profile they supply. Do not convert on import and then edit.

Expect the most saturated flowers to shift. A pure magenta petal has no CMYK equivalent, and a relative-colorimetric conversion will pull it toward a slightly duller pink while keeping the tonal separation inside the petal. That is the correct outcome. Perceptual rendering is gentler on the gradient but flattens the whole image, so proof both if the flower is the hero.

Ask for a contract proof on the actual stock for anything where the colour is the point. Paper does more to a red than the conversion does.

Metadata

The delivered file carries a title, description and keyword set in its IPTC fields, plus the asset id. Most layout applications read these, which makes tracking down which photograph ended up on which page much easier six months later. Nothing in the metadata identifies you or your purchase.

Web delivery

If the destination is a web page, do not upload the original. Re-encode to the width you actually display, export as WebP or AVIF with JPEG as the fallback, and let the browser choose. A seven-thousand-pixel botanical study served to a phone is several megabytes spent on pixels nobody will ever see, and it is the single most common cause of a slow image-heavy page.

Keep the original archived and treat every web asset as a derived file.