One of the main challenges of image analysis programs is being able to open any of the myriad image file formats that have been developed over the years. Due to code contributions and add-ons from various sources through its community development model, NIH Image was able to read multiple image types, a rare capability among the early image analysis programs. The majority of the formats were added by users needing support for proprietary formats from microscopes and other imaging equipment. As one of the first programs to widely support proprietary formats, it had the best supported and functional readers, modular software code used to read a file format and translate it into the open formats used by the software. These readers led to the development of reader code used not only in NIH Image and ImageJ but other programs as 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
