Supported File Formats

PictView decodes images with Windows Imaging Component (WIC), so the formats it opens are the formats Windows can decode on your computer.

Formats built into Windows

• BMP, DIB, RLE - Windows Bitmap
• DDS - DirectDraw Surface
• GIF - CompuServe GIF, including animations
• ICO - Windows icons
• JPEG, JPG, JPE, JFIF - JPEG, with EXIF information
• JXR, WDP - JPEG XR (HD Photo)
• PNG - Portable Network Graphics, including transparency
• TIFF, TIF - Tagged Image File Format, including multipage files

Formats added by installed codecs

Codecs from the Microsoft Store or from camera and software vendors add more formats to WIC. PictView finds them when it starts: their files open in the viewer and get thumbnails in the panel. Examples:

• HEIC, HEIF - High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF Image Extensions)
• AVIF - AV1 Image Format (AV1 Video Extension)
• WEBP - WebP (Webp Image Extensions; built into recent Windows versions)
• ARW, CR2, CR3, DNG, NEF, ORF, RW2, and other camera RAW formats (Raw Image Extension)
• JXL - JPEG XL, where Windows provides it

A format added this way joins Sally's viewer list once, when PictView first finds its codec. If you remove its mask from the viewer list, PictView does not add it again.

Formats PictView can save

• PNG - Portable Network Graphics
• JPEG - with selectable quality and chroma subsampling
• TIFF - uncompressed, LZW, or Deflate (ZIP) compressed
• BMP - Windows Bitmap
• GIF - CompuServe GIF