GeoServer's Output Formats

Geoserver has many output formats for both WMS and WFS. Here is a list of the output formats with their corresponding user-guides and tutorials.

To specify a specific output format for a WMS/WFS request, just attach the "format=..." parameter to the request.
The 'Example' links below will work if you have a local instance of GeoServer running.

WMS

• JPEG - (format=image/jpeg) - example
• GIF - (format=image/gif) - example
• PNG - (image/png)- example
• PNG8 - (image/png8)- example (Same as PNG, but computes an optimal 256 color palette and returns a paletted PNG, that is, the image size is usually smaller)
• Tiff - (image/tiff)- example
• Tiff8- (image/tiff9)- example (Same as TIFF, but computes an optimal 256 color palette and returns a paletted TIFF, that is, the image size is usually smaller)
• GeoTiff - (image/geotiff)- example
• GeoTiff8 - (image/geotiff8)- example (Same eal as with TIFF, plus the extra GeoTiff metadata).
• SVG - (format=image/svg)-
  example
• PDF - (format=application/pdf)- example
• GeoRSS - (format=RSS)- example
• KML - (format=KML)- example
• KMZ - (format=KMZ)- example
• Openlayers - (format=application/openlayers)- example

For GIF and PNG images the actual output is controlled by the palette parameter too, which allows for 256 color images. See more information in the WMS vendor parameter page.

WFS

• GML2 - (format=GML2)
• GML2 gZipped - (format=GML2-GZIP)
• Shapefile - (format=SHAPE-ZIP)
• JSON - (format=json) (http://geojson.org)

Want to create your own output formats? We have a tutorial just for you.