Photography and Travel Taking Your Camera on the Road - File Extensions: What program does this file belong to?

If you dig into your computer's hard drive innards, the stuff and junk you may have stockpiled all over the hard drive, you may often encounter a file with an extension you do not recognize and want to know "what program does this file belong to?" FILExt - The File Extension Source is an online source that helps search for file extensions to identify which program they belong.

A file name is made up of two sections, the first part that is the actual name of the file, followed by a period or "dot" and then the 3 or 4 letters that make up the file extension.

filename.ext

Some familiar file extensions would be html for HTML web pages, doc and xls for Microsoft Word and Excel files, and txt for text files.

FILExt features several ways of searching for file extensions by name or alphabet list. The file extension might bring up more than one option, so look for other clues that might help you identify the program associated with the file. For example, which directory did you find it in? Did you install one of the programs in the results? If not, it's probably not that one.

We love helpful resources like this!

random images, photography by Lorelle and Brent VanFossen - copyrighted

Authors, photographers, teachers, and public speakers, Lorelle and Brent VanFossen, travel extensively with their camera and pen in hand to bring you a variety of articles on nature and travel photography including basic nature photography and the photography business, writing, travel, recreational vehicles, web page design, and life on the road. All images, design, and content are copyrighted and protected by law.

You can find related articles to this topic in our Computer Tips and Tricks and Photography categories. The previous post is Book Industry Choosing Green and the next post is The Camera Club of the UK - 120 Years Old. File Extensions: What program does this file belong to?, Issue Number 829, by Lorelle VanFossen, was updated September 13th, 2005.

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People are talking here

Frederik Hertzum said:
April 17, 2007

Actually, want you are talking about is the mime-type of the file, but often (due to MS’ lack of flexibility) people think the way to identify the type of a file is by the extension. Want you really want to do is figure out what mime-type it has.

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