ISO

An ISO image is a sector-for-sector copy of an optical disc stored as a single file, based on the ISO 9660 file system standard from 1988. ISO files are the universal medium for distributing operating systems, software, and games — a .iso can be burned to physical media, mounted as a virtual drive, or booted directly by a virtual machine. Modern Windows and macOS can mount ISO files natively without third-party software.

File extensions	.iso
MIME type	application/x-iso9660-image
Developer	ISO (International Organization for Standardization)
First released	1988
Category	Archives
Open standard	Yes

What opens ISO files

• Windows (mount natively on Win 8+)
• macOS (Disk Utility)
• VirtualBox / VMware
• ImgBurn
• 7-Zip (extraction)

Browse File Formats

Reference details for 53 file formats — extensions, MIME types, what opens each one, and how they convert.

7Z Archives ABW Documents AI Images AVIF Images AZW3 E-books BMP Images CSS Other CSV Spreadsheets DjVu E-books DOC Documents DOCX Documents EPS Images EPUB E-books FB2 E-books GIF Images GZ Archives HEIC Images HTML Documents ICO Images ISO Archives JPG Images JSON Other Keynote Presentations Markdown Documents MOBI E-books Numbers Spreadsheets ODP Presentations ODS Spreadsheets ODT Documents OTF Other Pages Documents PDF Documents PNG Images PPT Presentations PPTX Presentations PSD Images RAR Archives RAW Images RTF Documents SVG Images TAR Archives TeX / LaTeX Documents TIFF Images TSV Spreadsheets TTF Other TXT Documents WebP Images WOFF / WOFF2 Other WPD Documents XLS Spreadsheets XLSX Spreadsheets XML Documents ZIP Archives