PNG
Portable Network Graphics
PNG was created in 1996 as an open, patent-free alternative to GIF after licensing disputes arose over GIF's LZW compression. It supports lossless compression, a full RGB color spectrum, and an alpha transparency channel — features that make it the preferred format for user interface graphics, screenshots, and any image where sharp edges or text must remain crisp. PNG does not support animation (its animated sibling, APNG, is a separate extension).
| File extensions | .png |
| MIME type | image/png |
| Developer | PNG Development Group |
| First released | 1996 |
| Category | Images |
| Open standard | Yes |
What opens PNG files
- All modern web browsers
- Adobe Photoshop
- GIMP
- Preview (macOS) / Windows Photo Viewer
Common conversions
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