Native production delivers files in their original format, preserving formulas, revision history and embedded metadata. Image production delivers page pictures with a load file, which is stable and easy to redact and Bates-number but discards everything the digital form carried. Most protocols now use both, by format.
| Dimension | NativeThe original file, as it exists in the source system. | Image (TIFF/PDF)Page images plus a load file of extracted text and fields. |
|---|---|---|
| Metadata | Preserved — embedded application metadata travels with the file. | Only the fields the load file carries; embedded metadata is gone. |
| Spreadsheets | Formulas, hidden rows, multiple tabs and comments all usable. | A picture of whatever happened to be on screen. Frequently useless. |
| Redaction | Harder, and error-prone — redacting an image while the native retains the text underneath is a recurring leak. | Straightforward and verifiable, which is why images persist. |
| Bates numbering | No fixed pages, so numbering is per-document rather than per-page. | Page-level stamping, which trial practice is built around. |
| Volume and cost | Smaller; no conversion step. | Larger, and conversion is a per-page processing cost. |
| Presentation at deposition or trial | Needs the originating application; can behave differently on different machines. | Renders identically for everyone, every time. |
| Chat and messaging | Preserves thread structure, reactions, edits and attachments. | Imposes artificial page breaks on a continuous conversation. |
Choose Native when
Choose native for anything whose meaning depends on more than its appearance: spreadsheets, presentations with speaker notes, databases, audio and video, and chat or collaboration content. Choose it also where the dispute concerns authorship, timing or alteration, because the embedded metadata is the evidence and imaging destroys it.
Choose Image (TIFF/PDF) when
Choose images for documents requiring redaction, for material that will be used heavily at deposition and trial where page-level citation matters, and for ordinary correspondence and static documents where nothing is lost. A hybrid — natives for the formats that need them, images for the rest, natives on request for anything redacted — is what most current protocols specify.
Where this goes wrong
Producing everything as images is the default that quietly destroys evidence. A spreadsheet imaged as TIFF loses its formulas, so the calculation at the centre of a damages dispute becomes unreviewable; an email imaged as PDF loses the routing headers that distinguish a genuine message from a spoofed one. The producing party believes it has complied, the requesting party discovers the loss only after loading the production, and the remedy is a re-production that costs more than doing it correctly would have. The mirror error is demanding natives for everything, then facing a redaction problem with no good answer.
What the rules actually say
A requesting party may specify a form of production. If it does not, the producing party must produce in the form in which the information is ordinarily maintained, or in a reasonably usable form — and it may not convert electronically stored information to a form that makes it more difficult or burdensome to use.
That last clause is the one that decides most disputes, and it is why blanket imaging of spreadsheets is hard to defend. Converting a working spreadsheet into a picture of a spreadsheet plainly makes it more burdensome to use, and the Advisory Committee said as much.
The redaction trap
Redaction is the strongest practical argument for images, and it is also where the most damaging mistakes happen.
Applying a black box over text in a PDF viewer without flattening the document leaves the text underneath, retrievable by anyone who selects and copies it. Producing a redacted image alongside the unredacted native defeats the redaction entirely. And redacting a spreadsheet is genuinely difficult, because hiding a cell does not remove it from the file.
Where natives must be redacted, the workable approach is producing a redacted image of that document specifically, with the native withheld and logged — agreed in the ESI protocol rather than improvised at production.
Chat is where the old model breaks
Messaging content has no natural pages. Imaging a channel means deciding arbitrarily where one document ends and the next begins — by day, by conversation, by a fixed number of messages — and each choice distorts the record differently.
This is now among the most commonly litigated production questions and among the least often addressed in protocols drafted from older templates. Agreeing unitisation for chat in advance is worth more than agreeing almost anything else about form.
Settle it before collection, not after
Form of production determines how material is processed, and processing is expensive and hard to redo. A party that collects and processes for image production and is then ordered to produce natives may have to reprocess everything. Fixing the form early is not a formality; it is the decision that determines whether the work has to be done twice.
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