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What is a Bitmap?

A bitmap represents an image as a rectangular grid of pixels, each storing a color or intensity value. Depending on context, the term may mean one bit per pixel or more broadly any raster image.

How Bitmaps work

A bitmap lays samples out over a fixed two-dimensional pixel grid, making spatial resolution intrinsic to the representation. The word can narrowly mean a one-bit map or broadly mean any raster buffer, while BMP names a specific file family and should not be treated as a synonym in API design. Encoded formats are decoded into bitmap memory for compositing and filters. That working buffer is sized by dimensions, channels, depth, row stride, and sometimes multiple planes.

Key facts

  1. A compressed PNG or JPEG may occupy little storage yet expand into a much larger bitmap in memory, so decoders should budget against pixel dimensions rather than file bytes alone.
  2. Row stride can include alignment padding beyond visible pixels, and rows may be stored top-down or bottom-up; copying width times bytes-per-pixel can corrupt such buffers.
  3. Raster enlargement must synthesize new pixels and cannot recover missing detail, unlike vector rendering, which evaluates geometric primitives at the requested output size.

When Bitmaps matter

Applications decode images into bitmaps for canvas drawing, filtering, pixel analysis, or raster export. Memory use grows with dimensions and bit depth even when the encoded source file is highly compressed.

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