Bio-Formats

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.

If you are having an issue with Bio-Formats and need support, please see the support page.

Purpose

Bio-Formats' 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 About Bio-Formats for further information.

Supported formats

Bio-Formats supports more than a hundred file formats.

For users

Many software packages use Bio-Formats to read and write microscopy formats.

For developers

You can use Bio-Formats to easily support these formats in your software.

More information

For more information, see the Bio-Formats web site.

Pull request testing

We welcome pull requests from anyone, but ask that you please verify the following before submitting a pull request:

verify that the branch merges cleanly into develop
verify that the branch compiles with the clean jars tools Ant targets
verify that the branch compiles using Maven
verify that the branch does not use syntax or API specific to Java 1.8+
run the unit tests (ant test) and correct any failures
test at least one file in each affected format, using the showinf command
internal developers only: run the data tests against directories corresponding to the affected format(s)
make sure that your commits contain the correct authorship information and, if necessary, a signed-off-by line
make sure that the commit messages or pull request comment contains sufficient information for the reviewer(s) to understand what problem was fixed and how to test it