Applications with PNG Support

Maintenance Note The PNG-supporting applications and toolkits pages are no longer being actively updated; for several years already, it's been safe to assume that virtually any bitmap-capable image app supports PNG. Corrections are still welcome, particularly for "repurposed domains" (park-spam), but new applications are no longer being added.

For those of you who simply wish to buy a commercial application or download a zipfile full of executables and start looking at or making pictures, the pages below have pointers to a large number of applications that are known to support PNG in one form or other, or that are going to support PNG in the near future. Some of the programs (particularly those for Unix) are provided as source code and may require libpng and/or zlib (see PNG Source Code and Libraries), but often even these have pre-built binaries for popular systems somewhere nearby.

Also take a look at the W3C's page of PNG testimonials for the official word from companies like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Agfa.

The list of applications currently spans nine main sections:

• Browsers
• Image Viewers
• Image Editors
• Image Converters
• 3D Applications
• Games / Entertainment
• Office / Business Applications
• Scientific / Graphing Applications
• Miscellaneous Applications

Note that there is a fair amount of overlap between the editors and converters categories; editors that are capable of saving in multiple formats can also be used to convert between image formats. The same is true for some image viewers.

In addition, the following pages list some specialized PNG-supporting applications:

• VRML Browsers
  • ImageTexture Examples on Opaque Materials:
    • Palette-Based Textures
    • 8-bps Grayscale and RGB Textures
    • 16-bps Grayscale and RGB Textures
  • ImageTexture Examples on Partially Transparent Materials:
    • Palette-Based Textures
    • 8-bps Grayscale and RGB Textures
    • 16-bps Grayscale and RGB Textures
• Libraries and Toolkits
• PNG Source Code

And this page lists physical devices with PNG support:

• Hardware with PNG Support

Note that there are also quite a number of applications that support MNG, PNG's animated cousin; see this page for details:

• Applications with MNG Support

Of the apps listed so far, many (though not most) appear to use the free zlib library but independent (non-libpng) implementations of the PNG code. Bugs have been noted where known, but don't take any of this as gospel truth; new releases occur all the time, and many bugs in older versions are fixed in later ones. Life is full of change and uncertainty.

(Big thanks to everyone who has provided Greg with pointers and corrections to these pages!)

Here are some related PNG pages at this site:

• Screenshots of Browsers and PNG Transparency:
  • Internet Explorer 5.0 for Mac OS
  • iCab 1.9 beta for Mac OS
  • OmniWeb 3.1rc2 for Mac OS X Server
  • Mozilla 2000-04-14 for Linux
    • also using random-dithered binary transparency
  • CSCMail 1.7.8 for Linux
  • NetPositive 2.2 for BeOS
  • WebTV

• PNG Home Page
• Complete PNG Site Map

Copyright © 1995-2011 Greg Roelofs.