[Zope] CMF Photo Album + "Raw" Image Formats

[Tom Purl]

I'm a newb when it comes to archiving images, so any help you can give 
me would be greatly appreciated.

I want to use Plone as a content management system (CMS) my images, 
which are currently stored on my hard drive as PNM files.  These files 
are scanned copies of 4x6 images, and are usually ~6 MB in size.  I am 
using Plone 2.0.4 with CMF Photo Album/Photo 0.5.0 and  pil 1.1.4.  I 
use the PNM file format for my pictures because it's the "rawest" format 
that I can use with xsane (I also use Gentoo Linux).

When I upload my pictures in the PNM format to Plone, I'm not able to 
see them.  I then tried converting the image (using convert) to a tiff 
file (since that's also pretty "raw", right?) and uploading it. 
However, I'm still not able to see the image in my cmf photo album.  I 
ended up converting it to a bitmap, and I'm able to see that in my album.

Is the bmp file format considered a "raw" format?  I would like to keep 
it as raw as possible so that I can use (or at least convert) my images 
50 years from now.  Is there a better format to use?

I'm using plone as my CMS because I want to attach metadata to my 
images.  Is anyone else using a different free program that works better 
than this solution?

Thanks in advance!

Tom Purl