Terence posted a challenge today:

Here’s my challenge to you - can you do any better? What’s the smallest filesize you can find for a viewable image?

The Netpbm project comes with a bunch of file formats I often reach for when I want to generate images without a lot of code or external dependencies. They have binary and ASCII versions, here’s how to generate a plain text, 1×1 white image using the monochrome pbm format:

1

P1 1 1 0

If you copy and paste that into your favorite text editor and save it as white-pixel.pbm you should get a file that weighs 8 bytes. Here’s what that looks like on my machine:

A screenshot displaying a hex editor on the left and a plain white square image labeled white-pixel.pbm on the right. The text content in the hex editor reads P1 1 1 0.