| Extension | XCF |
| Full Name | GIMP - eXperimental Computing Facility |
| Type | Image |
| Mime Type | application/octet-stream |
| Format | Binary |
XCF files are the native file format of the GIMP image editing software and, as such, have been designed to store all the image data and editing features of the GIMP software.
These features include images, layers, paths, alpha channels, and other image-related metadata. The size of an XCF file tends to become rather large when working on large images. This is due to the format saving all data in a non-lossy format to ensure no detail is lost during saves.
As XCF files are native to the GIMP software, support for editing them using other image editing software is limited, and GIMP is the recommended software to edit these files. Our range of XCF file converters will attempt to convert these files to most other image formats.
The STL, or Standard Triangle Language, file format has been around since the '80s and is supported by most modern 3D modelling applications. In particular, the STL format has become something of a standard format within the area of 3D printing, despite the rise of more modern formats such as 3MF.
STL files come in two flavours: binary or text format. The text format is human-readable, making it easy to perform manual edits, but can lead to very large file sizes. As you can imagine, the binary format is much more compact and represents the majority of the STL files you are likely to encounter.
The format itself is very simple; the 3D model is represented by a sequential list of triangles, with each triangle defined with 3 points consisting of their X, Y, and Z positions, along with an additional vector that contains the face normal (the direction the face is pointing). There is an additional attribute block for each triangle; however, this is largely unused and thus unsupported.
