image/png

The lossless workhorse of the web, invented to replace GIF when its compression patent turned hostile. Send it for screenshots, diagrams, and anything with sharp edges or transparency — but not photographs, where its lossless compression produces files several times larger than JPEG for no visible gain. The eight-byte signature is deliberately paranoid: it embeds CR-LF so a file mangled by text-mode transfer fails to open instead of decoding garbage.

Defined by W3C PNG (Third Edition) · IANA registration. Registry facts from the IANA media-types registry via mime-db.