There are a number of color encoding standards that have lately been developed ant are being proposed to the imaging community for different encoding steps in the color imaging workflow, optimized for different purposes. In this paper, their applicability for master and derivative image file encoding for image databases is discussed. Several types of image databases are defined, and the advantages and disadvantages of archiving master files after different image workflow steps are outlined. Several input- and output-referred encodings are summarized and discussed in relation to their applicability for image database file encoding.