---
title: Media Formats
description: The image, document, audio, video, and 3D model formats a museum can bring into Preservated, and what visitors and integrators see for each.
section: formats
order: 3
updated: 2026-07-14
verified: 2026-07-14
related: [formats, formats/export-packages, protocols/iiif]
features: [multi-format-assets, format-downloads, 3d-model-assets]
---

# Media Formats

Preservated accepts a defined set of file types per media kind, stores the original unchanged, and generates web-delivery derivatives from it. This page is a quick orientation for integrators; the full authoritative table (per-format notes and size limits) is public at [Supported File Formats](/docs/en-US/reference/supported-file-formats).

## What a museum can bring in

- **Images** — JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, TIFF, and HEIC/HEIF.
- **Documents** — PDF, Word (.docx/.doc/.rtf), PowerPoint (.pptx/.ppt), Excel (.xlsx/.xls), and OpenDocument equivalents (.odt/.ods/.odp).
- **Audio** — MP3, WAV, M4A, FLAC.
- **Video** — MP4, MOV, AVI, WebM.
- **3D models** — GLB (Binary glTF 2.0), self-contained only; Draco, KTX2/Basis, and meshopt compression supported.

The original upload is always preserved byte-for-byte as the preservation master and stays downloadable; nothing you see on the public site is the master itself.

## What visitors and integrators see

Every media kind gets web-delivery derivatives generated from its master:

- **Images** get thumbnails, web-sized previews, and deep-zoom tiles for pan-and-zoom viewing — see [IIIF](/developers/en-US/protocols/iiif) for how to consume the deep-zoom service.
- **Documents** get page-by-page rendered images (Word/PowerPoint/Excel/ODF files are converted to a paged rendition first) plus extracted or OCR'd text, so a document can be read page-by-page without downloading the original file format.
- **Audio** gets a waveform preview and plays directly in the browser.
- **Video** gets a web-friendly streaming proxy and a poster frame; unusual source codecs are transcoded to something broadly playable.
- **3D models** get a rendered poster image (used in grids, previews, and IIIF thumbnails) and an interactive in-browser viewer; the GLB itself is delivered through an access-checked same-origin URL with `Content-Type: model/gltf-binary`, published in the artifact's IIIF manifest as a Presentation 3.0 `Model` resource — see [IIIF](/developers/en-US/protocols/iiif).

Multi-page documents also expose a lightweight hover/focus preview that flips through their first few pages, useful for browse and search-result grids.

## Access-controlled material

Not every derivative is publicly reachable. An institution can restrict an artifact — or an individual file attached to it — to signed-in members or staff. A derivative being smaller or lower-resolution than the master doesn't imply it's public; always respect the visibility your integration observes through the surfaces in [Protocols & APIs](/developers/en-US/protocols/oai-pmh), which only ever expose what's public.