PNG

Acronym for Portable Network Graphics, which is a bitmap image format that uses lossless data compression. PNG was created in an effort to improve upon and replace the more common, as of its creation, GIF format. PNG, or "pings", have the advantage of not requiring a patent license, being platform independent, and being able to display more than 256 colors. One of the biggest detractors is that the PNG format does not natively support animation all though efforts are underway such as APNG and MPG. All though PNG is officially pronounced as "ping", the acronym form, "pee-en-gee", is often used to avoid confusion with the ping networking tool/command.