Image Formats
Format-by-format reference for the modern web. Spec sheets, compression characteristics, browser support, and when to use each.
Raster formats
Pixel grids — the dominant web image format family. Photographic content, UI graphics, and most everyday imagery.
The open, royalty-free AV1-based image format that delivers the smallest files at a given quality, with alpha transparency, animation, and HDR built in.
Google's raster format with near-universal browser support, transparency, and animation. A practical fallback when you serve AVIF to capable clients.
A lossless format prized for crisp edges and full alpha transparency. Convert PNG photos to AVIF to shed weight while keeping graphics in PNG.
The 1992 lossy standard behind most web photos. Re-encoding JPG sources as AVIF typically halves file size at matching visual quality.
The 1987 animation format capped at 256 colours and 1-bit transparency. Animated AVIF replaces it with far smaller, full-colour clips.
Microsoft's 1990 bitmap stores pixels raw, yielding bulky files. Convert BMP to AVIF for web-ready images a fraction of the size.
A 1986 lossless format favoured in print and scanning archives. Browsers can't display it, so convert TIFF to AVIF for online use.
Apple's HEVC-based iPhone photo container. Like AVIF it compresses tightly, but browser support is thin, so convert before publishing.
A 1985 Microsoft container packing several icon sizes into one file. It remains the go-to format for browser favicons across every platform.
Vector formats
Resolution-independent shapes. Logos, icons, line art, and anything that needs to scale to any size.
Raw & Professional
Working file formats from design and publishing tools. Layered, lossless, large.
Photoshop's native format preserving layers, masks, and effects. Keep it as your editable master and export flattened AVIF for the web.
Illustrator's proprietary vector source format for logos and illustrations. Export to SVG for vector delivery or AVIF for raster web use.
A 1992 PostScript-based vector format built for print exchange between applications. PDF and SVG have largely replaced it for new projects.
Specialised formats
Niche formats for games, scientific imaging, HDR, embedded devices, and legacy systems.
Truevision's 1984 raster format with optional RLE compression and an alpha channel, still common in game-engine and 3D texture pipelines.
A 1-bit monochrome bitmap from 1999 built for WAP feature phones. Smartphones long ago dropped it in favour of PNG, SVG, and modern formats.
Microsoft's 1999 DirectX texture format using GPU block compression and built-in mipmaps. Purpose-built for real-time 3D, not the web.
Industrial Light & Magic's OpenEXR holds 32-bit float colour and many render-pass channels, making it the storage standard for film VFX and HDR.
Greg Ward's 1989 RGBE format was one of the first to capture extended dynamic range, and it endures for 3D environment maps and image-based lighting.