Image File Types

The choice of file types to save images such as GIF, JPG (JPEG), BMP, PNG, and TIFF can be daunting. This tutorial helps to explain what each of these file types mean and which format you should use for what purpose.

When trying to decide a format for the Internet such as for your websites or if you need to send an email attachment two important criteria are:

• File Size
• Image Quality

File Size

One of the most important criterion is usually file size. To view the image, each user will need to download it. This is important if anyone of your targeted audience might be connected via a slow Internet or if you trying to send images by email and some recipients may have an email account with disk space quota. Many email systems will just flat out refuse to send files that are too big. I used to get messages like when trying to use Yahoo email account.

If you are in a country where any of these issues are of importance or your intended audience for your niche site has restricted Internet, this tutorial may help you.

Image Quality

The other important criterion when selecting an image format is image quality. There is usually a trade-off between quality and file size. For example, you can compress a file size to a smaller size but file quality will be impacted.

Different Image File Types

• JPEG (JPG)
• GIF
• PNG
• TIFF
• Raw
• BMP
• PSD
• ICO
• PDF & PostScript
• SVG