File Extension BMP

File type: Bitmap Image File

About the BMP file type:

If Windows cannot find the appropriate program associated with .BMP files, then your registry may have errors. Check your Windows registry for errors (includes file association errors).

The BMP file extension belongs to the format of digital image files employed by a number of manipulating or editing applications today. Files with the BMP file extensions had first been utilized for the Operating Systems of Microsoft Windows particularly the application MS Paint and by other OS/2 systems as well. With the present technology, programmers have already developed several high-end graphic software applications that employ BMP extensions as a basic formatting tool for graphic or image files making their conversion to other formats such as GIF, PNG, JPEG, etc. easy.


Detailed information for file extension BMP

Category: Raster Image Files
File format: Proprietary/Open-source
Open with Windows: Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 - Free Trial, ACDSee Photo Manager, Microsoft Windows Photo Gallery Viewer, Nuance PaperPort, Nuance OmniPage Professional, Roxio Easy Media Creator, The Logo Creator, and other image viewers
Open with Linux: Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo, Roxio Easy Media Creator
Because images with the BMP file extension are regarded as basic formats utilized in graphics or pictures, the file makes images by means of pixels that use a color depth ranging from 1 to 32 bits per pixel. There are different types of BMP images based on color depth. These include the Grayscale and Indexed Colors ranging from 1 to 8 bits of color per pixel, and the Alpha Channels employed for images integrating transparency schemes and utilizing 16 to 32 bit of colors per pixel. It is then safe to say that when the BMP format graphics or image has a bigger bit per pixel, the higher the quality is. The BMP file extension employed for images is also referred to as an uncompressed bitmap file, meaning that its file size is larger than compressed images such as GIF, PNG, JPG, etc.