A list of graphics file formats can be found at The Graphics File Formats Page.
The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite on June 15, 1987.
A shareware program for developing GIF animations.
JPEG is designed for compressing either full-color or gray-scale images of natural, real-world scenes. It works well on photographs, naturalistic artwork, and similar material; not so well on lettering, simple cartoons, or line drawings. JPEG handles only still images, but there is a related standard called MPEG for motion pictures.
PNG is designed to work well in online viewing applications, such as the World Wide Web, so it is fully streamable with a progressive display option. PNG is robust, providing both full file integrity checking and simple detection of common transmission errors. Also, PNG can store gamma and chromaticity data for improved color matching on heterogeneous platforms.
An animated illustration of the PNG 2-D interlacing.
The PDF is now an open standard, maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). PDF documents can contain links and buttons, form fields, audio, video, and business logic.
Windows bitmap files are stored in a device-independent bitmap (DIB) format that allows Windows to display the bitmap on any type of display device.
In terms of actually reading such file formats, code for simple 24-bit .bmp file reading and manipulation is available: 24-bit bmp demo
