What is MAP format?

MAP (Colormap intensities and indices)

MAP is one of ImageMagick's raw formats, and it stores an image the way palette-based hardware thinks about one. The file begins with the colormap — the list of colours the image uses, each written as its red, green and blue intensities — and continues with one index per pixel, row by row, each pointing at an entry in that list. Nothing else is in it.

Getting there means reducing the image to a limited palette first, so photographs and smooth gradients lose colour precision and can show banding, while logos, pixel art, icons and screenshots with few colours come through cleanly. That trade is the point: indexed colour is what small displays, microcontroller graphics, older game hardware and some image-processing pipelines are built around, and MAP hands them the palette and the indices directly.

The format carries no header, so the image dimensions are not recorded in the file. Note the width and height when converting, because any program reading a MAP back, ImageMagick included, has to be told them, along with the colour depth.

The .map extension is shared by many unrelated formats: GIS and MapInfo maps, game level files, linker map files and source maps among them. This site only writes ImageMagick colormap files and does not read .map files of any kind, so those other formats are not something it can open.

What programs can open MAP format?

  • ImageMagick
  • GraphicsMagick
  • Custom scripts and firmware tools that read raw palette data

Use cases for MAP format?

  • Graphics for embedded and microcontroller displays
  • Indexed-colour retro and game assets
  • Extracting an image's palette and pixel indices
  • Image-processing pipelines that work in indexed colour
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MAP Converter