Other Bitmap Formats

The X Window System uses a similar XBM format for black-and-white images, and XPM (pixelmap) for color images. Numerous other uncompressed bitmap file formats are in use, though most not widely. Much more common are the standardized compressed bitmap files such as GIF, PNG, TIFF, and JPEG. TIFF and JPEG have various options. JPEG is usually lossy compression. TIFF is usually either uncompressed, or lossless Lempel-Ziv-Welch compressed like GIF. PNG uses deflate lossless compression, another Lempel-Ziv variant.

There are also a variety of “raw” image files, which store raw bitmaps with no other information; such raw files are just bitmaps in files, often with no header or size information, and should not be confused with photographic raw image formats, which store raw unprocessed sensor data in a structured container such as TIFF format along with extensive image metadata.