The challenges with standard Notes

Importing images into Lotus Notes has been possible since Notes R3. Unfortunately the earlier versions have always had some severe limitations, such as:

• You were limited to use the only the client and manually import images.
  
  This got better with R4 where the @FileImport-function was introduced
• You were limited to use 256 color palettes.
  
  R3 and R4 had did not save the original imported image, but converted it to a special Notes bitmap with a specific color palette. This often distorted the image.
• You were limited to use GIF, JPG or BMPs, and non-compressed TIFF 5.0
  
  R5 could finally retrain the original format of the image, but only if the image was GIF or JPG. All other formats are converted to Notes' own bitmap format (which is a type of TIFF encoding). However, the special Notes palette isn't used anymore, which was a great improvement
• The C++ API Import method would only allow 256 colors.
  
  Starting from R5 the Notes C++ API got the method Import, but it was limited to the Notes palette!
• Domino XML (DXL) image format was unofficial.
  
  The DXL support first arrived with R5 and enabled the users to export and import data with a Domino variant of XML, DXL. Unfortunately it was still kind of hard to work with images, since it involves encoding and decoding of Base64 streams.