How can I cooperate with the Bio-Formats developers to improve support for a format?

If you are a programmer, you can help by writing and contributing a file format reader module for Bio-Formats—see How do I add support for a file format to Bio-Formats?.

If you are a user, but do not control the format, you can help by letting us know you are interested in the format, and sending us some sample data if possible. Several currently supported formats were added specifically because someone emailed us asking about them. We have an FTP server set up for users to upload large data to us—email us for details.

If you do control the format, you can start by releasing technical details to the community. Publishing a file format specification document, sample data files, and example source code to your web site is extremely useful for external developers to successfully deal with your format. Once you do, we invite you to let us know and we will be glad to work on adding support for the format as our time permits.

If you are a company unwilling to release details publicly, we urge you to reconsider—see Why should my organization open our file format to the community?. If you insist upon keeping your format secret, you could implement your own Bio-Formats file format reader module to enable support in third party applications such as ImageJ, OME and VisBio. Or you could send technical details to the Bio-Formats developers, who will attempt to add support for it, as time permits.