TGA to BMP Converter: Free, Private, No Upload

What actually changes in this conversion

• Both TGA and BMP are lossless, so the pixels come through unchanged.
• BMP cannot store transparency, so transparent areas are filled with white.
• Expect the BMP file to be somewhat larger than the TGA source.
• EXIF, GPS and camera data are stripped on every conversion. That is good for privacy, but you lose capture dates.

About TGA: history and technical details

Created by Truevision in 1984 for the TARGA and VISTA graphics cards. It became a standard for video editing (Windows and Mac) and later game texture pipelines. Still widely used in Unity, Unreal and 3D tools.

Technical: 18-byte header with image type, colour map, width, height, bit depth. Types 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11 for uncompressed and RLE variants. Supports 8-bit indexed, 15/16-bit high colour, 24-bit truecolour, 32-bit with alpha. Bottom-left origin by default.

Real-world size: A 1024x1024 32-bit TGA is 4 MB uncompressed, 1-3 MB with RLE. A 2048x2048 texture is 16 MB uncompressed. Game engines prefer DDS or KTX2 for shipping but TGA for authoring.

Popular tools: Unity, Unreal Engine, Blender, GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, ImageMagick, NVIDIA Texture Tools.

Alternatives: DDS (better for games), KTX2 (modern GPU texture), PNG (universal), WebP (web).

About BMP: what you get

Created by Microsoft for Windows 1.0 in 1985 as the native bitmap format for the Windows Graphics Device Interface. The "BM" signature has been unchanged since then. Still used in embedded systems and legacy Windows software.

Technical: File header 14 bytes (signature, size, reserved, offset) followed by DIB header (40+ bytes). Supports 1, 4, 8, 16, 24, 32-bit pixels. Rows padded to 4-byte boundaries. Pixels can be stored bottom-up or top-down. Optional RLE4/RLE8 rarely used.

Real-world size: A 12-megapixel photo is 36 MB as 24-bit BMP. As JPG it is 2-4 MB (90% smaller). A 1920x1080 screen at 32-bit BMP is 8.3 MB; as PNG 200-600 KB.

Popular tools: Windows Paint, IrfanView, XnView, ImageMagick, GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, embedded dev tools.

Alternatives: PNG (lossless, 5-20x smaller), TGA (game pipelines), TIFF (professional print), JPG (lossy, much smaller).

Browser and software compatibility

TGA: Supported by game engines and 3D tools, but not displayed by browsers. BMP: Opens in browsers and most desktop software, but almost never used on the web.

BMP output opens in browsers and most desktop software, but very few web workflows expect it.

Why people move away from TGA

• Browsers and most messaging apps cannot display TGA, so sharing it is awkward.
• TGA files are large because compression is minimal.

Why people choose BMP

• Some legacy Windows software, embedded displays and industrial tools only read BMP.
• With no compression there is no decoding step and no compression artefacts.

Common mistakes with TGA

• Uploading TGA to a website — browsers will not display it
• Forgetting alpha channel in TGA exports — some tools drop it
• Assuming RLE TGA is fast — it is slower to decode than uncompressed

Best practices for keeping quality

• A TGA from a game pipeline may use a bottom-left origin or channel-packed data. Compare against the original before relying on it.
• Expect a very large file. Check the upload limit and free disk space before saving.
• Flatten any transparency first. BMP does not reliably carry an alpha channel.
• Resize before converting if the image will be shown small. A 4000 pixel photo displayed at 800 pixels wastes bytes in any format.
• Check the result at 100 percent zoom, especially around text, edges and gradients, before you replace any originals.
• Keep your original files. Conversions to a lossy format cannot be undone.
• When you convert a set of images, use the same quality setting for the whole batch. The converter handles up to 20 files at once.