---

Supported Image File Formats

Cocoa supports many common image formats internally and can import image data from many more formats through the use of the Image I/O framework (ImageIO.framework).

In this section:

Basic Formats
TIFF Compression
Support for Other File Formats

Basic Formats

Table 6-5 lists the formats supported natively by Cocoa. (Uppercase versions of the filename extensions are also recognized.)

TIFF Compression

TIFF images can be read from compressed data, as long as the compression algorithm is one of the four schemes described in Table 6-6.

An NSImage object can also produce compressed TIFF data using any of these schemes. To get the TIFF data, use the TIFFRepresentationUsingCompression:factor: method of NSImage.

Support for Other File Formats

In Mac OS X v10.4 and later, NSImage supports many additional file formats using the Image I/O framework. To get a complete list of supported filename extensions, use the imageFileTypes class method of NSImage. The list of supported file formats continues to grow but Table 6-7 lists some of the more common formats that can be imported.

The Image I/O framework is part of Quartz, although the actual framework is part of the Application Services framework. Image I/O handles the importing and exporting of many file formats. To use Quartz directly, you read image data using the CGImageSource opaque type and write using the CGImageDestination type. For more information on using the Image I/O framework to read and write images, see CGImageSource Reference and CGImageDestination Reference.

---