IDAT contains all of the image's compressed pixel data. Although single IDATs are perfectly valid as long as they contain no more than 2 gigabytes of compressed data, in most images the compressed data is split into several IDAT chunks for greater robustness. Since the chunk's CRC is at the end, a streaming application that encounters a large IDAT can either force the user to wait until the complete chunk arrives before displaying anything, or it can begin displaying the image without knowing if it's valid. In the latter case, if the IDAT happens to be damaged, the user will see garbage on the display. (Since the image dimensions were already read from a previously CRC-checked chunk, in theory the garbage will be restricted to the region belonging to the image.) Fortunately, small IDAT chunks are by far the most common, particularly in sizes of 8 or 32 kilobytes.

IEND is the simplest chunk of all; it contains no data, just indicates that there are no more chunks in the image. IEND is primarily useful when the PNG image is being transferred over the network as a stream, especially when it is part of a larger MNG stream (Chapter 12, "Multiple-Image Network Graphics"). And it serves as one more check that the PNG file is complete and internally self-consistent.

These three chunk types are sufficient to build truecolor and grayscale PNG files, with or without an alpha channel, but palette-based images require one more: PLTE, the palette chunk. PLTE simply contains a sequence of red, green, and blue values, where a value of 0 is black and 255 is full intensity; anywhere from 1 to 256 RGB triplets are allowed, depending on the pixel depth of the image. (That is, for a 4-bit image, no more than 16 palette entries are allowed.) The PLTE chunk must come before the first IDAT chunk; the structure of a colormapped PNG is shown in Figure 8-3.