well. A major example of this, and a vast improvement to ImageJ’s ability to read and parse proprietary image data, was the advent of Bio-Formats4, a library from the Open Microscopy Environment (www.openmicroscopy.org) for reading proprietary image formats. While Bio-formats is a general library used by many programs, ImageJ is its biggest user with the Bio-formats ImageJ Plugin used by over 30,000 laboratories. ImageJ has been far more than just a user of Bio-Formats; without the community driven model of ImageJ and the resulting vetting and testing process for every new format, Bio-Formats arguably would not have the performance and functionality it currently has. In this way ImageJ continues to benefit other programs that don’t directly use ImageJ but that take advantage of its framework and plugins and other code such as Bio-Formats.
