# Formats

Bio-Formats supports reading over 140 different file formats, and writing several common open formats. The Dataset Structure Table explains the file extension you should choose to open/import a dataset in any of these formats, while the Supported Formats table lists all of the formats and gives an indication of how well they are supported and whether Bio-Formats can write, as well as read, each format. The Summary of supported metadata fields table shows an overview of the OME data model fields populated for each format.

Further information on each individual format is also provided (click on the entries in the supported formats table).

We are always looking for examples of files to help us provide better support for different formats. If you would like to help, you can upload files to the Bio-Formats Zenodo community and let us know. If you have any questions, or would prefer not to use Zenodo, please contact us via the Image.sc forum. If your format is already supported, please refer to the ‘we would like to have’ section on the individual page for that format, to see if your dataset would be useful to us.

All the example files we have permission to share publicly are freely available from our sample image downloads site.

- Dataset Structure Table
- Supported Formats
- Summary of supported metadata fields
- Grouping files using a pattern file
- Support for “precompressed” tiles
- Additional reader and writer options