PNG images will now support HDR and animation

The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) image format, first introduced in 1995, has received its third version – PNG v3. ProgramMax reports this with reference to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which officially approved the updated standard on June 24, 2025. This is the first major update to the format in over 20 years – the previous version appeared back in 2003.

One of the main innovations was the appearance of support for HDR-quality images. Thanks to the use of the compact cICP color profile, HDR images in PNG format can be only 16 bytes larger than regular SDR variants, which makes them very efficient in terms of size.

The format also supports EXIF ​​data – now PNG files can contain information about camera models, GPS coordinates and other metadata, previously characteristic only of JPEG.

In addition, the new standard officially includes support for animated PNG (APNG). Although this format existed before, it has now become part of the official specification, creating the prerequisites for wider software support.

PNG v3 has been developed since 2021 with the participation of Adobe, Apple, and Google. The new format is already supported in Chromium-based browsers, Firefox, as well as macOS, iOS, Adobe Photoshop, and DaVinci Resolve.

In the future, the W3C plans to improve lossless compression algorithms and increase compatibility of HDR images with SDR displays and vice versa.