Load Jpg/Gif/Bitmap and convert to Bitmap

Delphi 2009 comes with built in support for JPEG, BMP, GIF and PNG.

For earlier versions of Delphi you may need to find third party implementations for PNG and GIF, but in Delphi 2009 you simply add the Jpeg, pngimage and GIFImg units to your uses clause.

If the file has an extension you can use the following code, as noted by others the TPicture.LoadFromFile looks at the extensions registered by the inherited classes to determine which image to load.

uses
  Graphics, Jpeg, pngimage, GIFImg;

procedure TForm1.Button1Click(Sender: TObject);
var
  Picture: TPicture;
  Bitmap: TBitmap;
begin
  Picture := TPicture.Create;
  try
    Picture.LoadFromFile('C:\imagedata.dat');
    Bitmap := TBitmap.Create;
    try
      Bitmap.Width := Picture.Width;
      Bitmap.Height := Picture.Height;
      Bitmap.Canvas.Draw(0, 0, Picture.Graphic);
      Bitmap.SaveToFile('C:\test.bmp');
    finally
      Bitmap.Free;
    end;
  finally
    Picture.Free;
  end;
end;

If the file extension is not known one method is to look at the first few bytes to determine the image type.

procedure DetectImage(const InputFileName: string; BM: TBitmap);
var
  FS: TFileStream;
  FirstBytes: AnsiString;
  Graphic: TGraphic;
begin
  Graphic := nil;
  FS := TFileStream.Create(InputFileName, fmOpenRead);
  try
    SetLength(FirstBytes, 8);
    FS.Read(FirstBytes[1], 8);
    if Copy(FirstBytes, 1, 2) = 'BM' then
    begin
      Graphic := TBitmap.Create;
    end else
    if FirstBytes = #137'PNG'#13#10#26#10 then
    begin
      Graphic := TPngImage.Create;
    end else
    if Copy(FirstBytes, 1, 3) =  'GIF' then
    begin
      Graphic := TGIFImage.Create;
    end else
    if Copy(FirstBytes, 1, 2) = #$FF#$D8 then
    begin
      Graphic := TJPEGImage.Create;
    end;
    if Assigned(Graphic) then
    begin
      try
        FS.Seek(0, soFromBeginning);
        Graphic.LoadFromStream(FS);
        BM.Assign(Graphic);
      except
      end;
      Graphic.Free;
    end;
  finally
    FS.Free;
  end;
end;