Taxonomy of Image File Formats

Professionals, practitioners, students, and novice users are overwhelmed with the different image file formats. This paper, proposes taxonomy for image file formats after reviewing 82 different image file formats based on the following attributes: raster/vector, compression, number of dimensions represented in the image. Still, these attributes are not mutually exclusive, which leads to more than 20 different classifications shown in the last section of this paper. This research paper is divided into five sections, the first four sections study raster, vector, 3D vector, and stereo formats. The last section shows the findings.