Java™ Media APIs: Cross-Platform Imaging, Media, and Visualization

Reading and Writing Basics

In the previous chapter we saw that with the Java2D package, input images are converted to Images using the getImage methods of the Applet class and the Toolkit class. In this chapter we'll see that, with the Image I/O package, input images are converted to BufferedImages using the read methods of the javax.imageio.ImageReader class. Generally, more than one ImageReader subclass will be available, so the initial step in reading an image is to choose an ImageReader that can decode the format of the image of interest. This is done by providing information about that image's format to a set of ImageReader service providers (javax.imageio.ImageReaderSpis). This information can be in the following forms:

• Image file suffix ...