PNG

Portable Network Graphics is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG was created to improve upon and replace GIF as an image-file format not requiring a patent license. The PNG acronym is optionally recursive, unofficially standing for PNG's Not GIF.

PNG supports palette-based images (with palettes of 24-bit RGB or 32-bit RGBA colors), grayscale images (with or without alpha channel), and RGB[A] images (with or without alpha channel). PNG was designed for transferring images on the Internet, not for print graphics, and therefore does not support non-RGB color spaces such as CMYK.

PNG supports transparent backgrounds, which makes it a popular and common choice amongst image designers.

It is possible to create animated PNG images using APNG.

PNG files nearly always use file extension " " or " " and are assigned MIME media type " ".