Bio-Formats is a standalone Java library for reading and writing life sciences image file formats. It is capable of parsing both pixels and metadata for a large number of formats, as well as writing to several formats. See the table below for a complete list (click the headers to sort, and format names to see all information). For more information on the format ratings, see the Supported Formats page.
Purpose
Bio-Formats's primary purpose is to convert proprietary microscopy data into an open standard called the OME data model, particularly into the OME-TIFF file format. See the Bio-Formats statement of purpose for a thorough explanation and rationale.
For users
Many software packages can use Bio-Formats to read and write microscopy formats:
For developers
You can use Bio-Formats as a library to easily support these formats in your software.
License
Bio-Formats is open source software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Alternately, you can obtain a commercial license for Bio-Formats from our commercial partner, Glencoe Software. See the Bio-Formats license page for more information.
Version history and roadmap
Bio-Formats is updated whenever a significant bug fix is made, or whenever a new version of OMERO is released. The version number is three numbers separated by dots; e.g., 4.0.0. See the what's new list for a history of major changes in each release.
The latest stable version of Bio-Formats is 4.4.6. For future development directions, see the 4.5 and 5.0 roadmaps.
Questions
See the Bio-Formats, File Formats and OME-XML and OME-TIFF sections of the OME FAQ for answers to some common questions. Please contact us if you have any questions or problems with Bio-Formats.
