BMP is the original bitmap image format from Microsoft, introduced with Windows 1.0 in 1985. A BMP file stores image data as an uncompressed grid of pixels with exact color values for each pixel. This means zero quality loss but very large file sizes — a standard 1920x1080 screenshot produces a 6 MB BMP file compared to 200 KB as PNG. BMP supports color depths from 1-bit monochrome through 32-bit with alpha transparency. The format uses a simple header followed by raw pixel data, making it trivially easy to read and write. BMP remains the default clipboard format on Windows and appears in legacy enterprise applications, industrial control systems, and older document management platforms. Paint, the built-in Windows image editor, historically saved as BMP by default.

BMP to text conversion is needed when working with legacy systems that output bitmap files. Older Windows applications, industrial equipment interfaces, and medical imaging software may export screenshots and reports as BMP. If you receive BMP files from colleagues using legacy software, extracting text from those images saves manual retyping. For modern scanning workflows, TIFF files are the more common format and we handle those too. Clipboard captures on some Windows configurations paste as BMP when saved. Older document management systems and scanning workflows that predate PNG may store documents as BMP files. Historical archives digitized with early scanning equipment often used BMP as the output format. For scanned documents saved as PDF, the PDF to text converter handles those directly.

ImagText processes BMP files by converting them to an optimized format server-side before AI analysis. Because BMP is uncompressed, the original pixel data is perfectly preserved during conversion — no quality loss at any stage. The AI vision model receives a pristine image with no compression artifacts whatsoever. This makes BMP one of the cleanest input formats for text extraction. The AI handles BMP files at any color depth, from 1-bit monochrome scans of old documents to full 32-bit color screenshots. Legacy BMP files with unusual color palettes or indexed color modes are normalized during conversion. The large file sizes of BMP do not affect processing speed since the server handles conversion efficiently. Any readable text in the BMP file will be extracted accurately.

BMP files produce excellent text extraction results because no information is lost to compression. The main limitation is file size — uncompressed BMP files can be very large, and the 10 MB upload limit may be reached with high-resolution images. A full-page 300 DPI color scan stored as BMP can exceed 25 MB. If your BMP file exceeds the limit, consider converting to lossless PNG first, which preserves all pixel data while dramatically reducing file size. For older BMP files with 8-bit or 4-bit color depth, the limited color palette does not affect text extraction since text is typically high-contrast. BMP files from industrial systems may have unusual resolutions or aspect ratios — the AI handles these without issue. The simple uncompressed nature of BMP means what you see in the image is exactly what the AI receives.