The BMP format is the native image format for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Historically it was an important format in productivity and publishing applications but has been displaced by more compact, efficient and portable formats such as JPEG, PNG and TIFF. BMP is still used in some applications. BMP files are high quality but large in comparison to the alternatives. Unlike other image-file formats like GIF and JPEG, the BMP file format was not designed to be portable. It was really designed to easily work with the Windows API using the same structures that Windows applications use to manipulate in-memory bitmaps. As Windows has changed, so has the BMP file format. Windows now has several documented versions of the BMP format. Visual Integrity can support any of these variations.