PNG (file format)

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a lossless bitmap image format. PNG was created to both improve upon and replace the GIF format with an image file format that does not require a patent license to use. PNG is officially pronounced as “ping” (/pɪŋ/ in IPA), but it is often just spelled out — possibly to avoid confusion with the internet tool ping. PNG is supported by the libpng reference library, a platform independent library that contains C functions for handling PNG images.

PNG files nearly always use the file extensions PNG and png and are assigned the MIME media type image/png (approved on October 14, 1996).

PNG is recommended by W3C .