Ticket #1912 (closed feature: duplicate)

ImageJ's current I/O infrastructure is largely built around the ij.io.FileInfo class. It generally assumes it is reading from a file, has many specialized considerations for TIFF and other formats, and is generally not modular in its design. There is also no real way to extend ImageJ's core I/O support other than to hack a special plugin called HandleExtraFileTypes, which has a number of limitations and disadvantages.
In contrast, the Bio-Formats library was designed with extensibility in mind. We propose a core ImageJ I/O package, similar to loci.formats, with IFormatReader- and IFormatWriter-like interfaces, to make it easier to extend ImageJ's file format support in a general way. Plugins implementing the correct interface would be automatically detected as new supported file types, and work out of the box with the ImageJ "Open" command.