View PBM files in your browser
Netpbm's black and white image, a bit a pixel. Open one right here at full size and keep it as PNG. Nothing leaves your device.
Or drop it anywhere on this page
What you'll see
Your file opens at actual size, or shrunk to fit your screen.
- Actual size, or shrunk to fit
- Drag to pan • Pinch or scroll to zoom
- Fullscreen
- Export • Save as PNG or JPEG
About PBM
PBM is the first member of Netpbm: Jef Poskanzer made it in 1988 to send black and white pictures as plain text. OCR engines like Tesseract and tracers like potrace still read it.
A PBM is a short text header with the width and the height, then a bit for each pixel, 1 for black and 0 for white, packed eight to a byte or written as numbers.
No browser shows PBM. Filepeek decodes it itself, and Export saves it as PNG or JPEG.
Portable Bitmap
.pbm
Format
- MIME type
- image/x-portable-bitmap
- Made by
- Jef Poskanzer
- Released
- 1988
Inside the file
- Pixels
- Black or white
- Depth
- 1 bit
- Header
- A line of text
- Pixels as
- Bytes or numbers
Opens in every browser
No browser shows PBM by itself. Filepeek decodes it in Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari.
- YouChromeOpens through Filepeek
- YouEdgeOpens through Filepeek
- YouFirefoxOpens through Filepeek
- YouSafariOpens through Filepeek
Questions
How do I open a PBM file?
Drop it on this page or press Peek a PBM. It opens at full size, with nothing to install.
How do I convert PBM to PNG?
Open it, then choose Export and Save as PNG.
Does it open plain PBMs?
Yes. A P1 file, whose pixels are written as 0 and 1, opens like a raw P4.
Is my image uploaded?
No. It opens inside your browser and never leaves your device.