eli5 How are pictures and images literally written on a drive

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I know this is ultra general, but Ive always wondered how pictures or sound is written to a drive. I understand slightly that data is stored as little bits of sequences of on or off switches, but if you were to write out a drive in english what would that look like for pictures. Does each pixel have a specific code like the #F000F4 or however you see them online? Hope there can be some sort of minor explanation. Thanks.

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

They are saved as a list of pixels wich is 1 byte per RGB colour. So basically binary numbers for 255 255 255 would be a white pixel while 0 0 0 is a black pixel.

You wouldn’t notice it’s a pic when looking at the raw data. The computer only knows to interpret it as a picture because of the file ending (.bmp in my example case) so you’d rather look for that information in the metadata.

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