| File type | Extension | IDL routine |
| Microsoft Bitmap | .bmp | read_bmp |
| Portable Network Graphics | .png | read_png |
| JPEG | .jpg or .jpeg | read_jpeg |
| Macintosh PICT | .??? | read_pict |
| Portable Bit/grey/pixelmap | .pbm .pgm .ppm | read_ppm |
| Sun Raster format | .??? | read_srf |
| Tagged Image File Format | .tiff or .tif | read_tiff |
| X11 Bitmap files | .xbm | read_x11_bitmap |
| X Windows Dump (from xwd) | ??? | read_xwd |
1For greyscale images, most of these require a file name and return a 2-d array of type Byte, but the syntax is not the same for all of these routines - see the manual for details. As an example, try this: