Supported Formats#

Note

If you just want to know if a specific extension/format is supported you can search this page using Ctrl+F and then type the name of the extension or format.

ImageIO reads and writes images by deligating your request to one of many backends. Example backends are pillow, ffmpeg, tifffile among others. Each backend supports its own set of formats, which is how ImageIO manages to support so many of them.

To help you navigate this format jungle, ImageIO provides various curated lists of formats depending on your use-case

All Formats#

Below you can find an alphabetically sorted list of all extensions/file-formats that ImageIO is aware of. If an extension is listed here, it is supported. If an extension is not listed here, it may still be supported if one of the backends supports the extension/format. If you encounter the latter, please create a new issue so that we can keep below list up to date and add support for any missing formats.

Each entry in the list below follows the following format:

extension (format_name): plugin1 plugin2 ...

where the plugins refer to imageio plugins that can handle the format. If you wish to use a specific plugin to load a format, you would use the name as specified here. For example, if you have a PNG file that you wish to open with pillow you would call:

iio.imread("image.png", format="PNG-PIL")

Format List

Note

To complete this list we are looking for each format’s full name and a link to the spec. If you come across this information, please consider sharing it by creating a new issue.