Raster image file formats

Formats that store a picture as a grid of pixels, each with its own colour. They suit photographs and screenshots. Most compress the grid, some without losing anything and some by dropping detail the eye is unlikely to miss.

Formats

.AVIF

AV1 Image File Format

Royalty-free AV1-compressed images in HEIF boxes, with alpha, HDR and animation.

.BMP

OS/2 bitmap array (BA)

Several OS/2 bitmaps, icons or pointers for different screens, chained in one file.

.BMP

Windows bitmap (BM)

Windows bitmaps: a header, an optional palette and rows of pixels.

.GIF

Graphics Interchange Format (GIF87a)

The first GIF: palette images on a logical screen, LZW compressed, no extensions.

.GIF

Graphics Interchange Format (GIF89a)

Palette images of up to 256 colours, LZW compressed, often animated.

.HEIC

High Efficiency Image File Format

HEVC-compressed photos in ISO media boxes, the iPhone's default since 2017.

.ICO

OS/2 colour icon (CI)

A colour OS/2 icon: a 1-bit mask bitmap followed by a colour image.

.ICO

OS/2 icon (IC)

A black and white OS/2 icon: AND and XOR masks in one 1-bit bitmap.

.JPG

JPEG image

Lossy compressed photographs, in marker segments with JFIF or Exif metadata.

.JXL

JPEG XL

The JPEG committee's newer format: lossy or lossless, HDR, and lossless JPEG repacking.

.PNG

Portable Network Graphics

Lossless raster images with transparency, stored in CRC-checked chunks.

.PPM

Netpbm image (PPM, PGM, PBM)

Uncompressed colour, greyscale or black and white images with a tiny text header.

.PTR

OS/2 colour pointer (CP)

A colour OS/2 mouse pointer: masks, a colour image and a hotspot.

.PTR

OS/2 pointer (PT)

A black and white OS/2 mouse pointer, with its hotspot in the header.

.QOI

Quite OK Image Format

A tiny lossless RGB and RGBA format, much faster to code than PNG.

.TGA

Truevision TGA

Simple raster images with alpha, raw or run-length encoded, common for game textures.

.TIFF

BigTIFF

TIFF with 64-bit offsets, for images and files larger than 4 GB.

.TIFF

Tagged Image File Format (classic)

Flexible tagged images for print, scanning and archives, often multi-page.

.WEBP

WebP image

Google’s web image format: lossy, lossless or animated, in RIFF chunks.