Polygon File Format .ply
Scanner output. Per-vertex colour, dense point clouds, ASCII or binary.
What a .ply file holds
PLY, the Stanford Triangle Format, was designed to hold the output of 3D scanners, and it shows: it stores arbitrary per-vertex properties, so colour, confidence and intensity ride along with position. It is the standard exchange format for photogrammetry and lidar work, and the format the Stanford Bunny ships in. Both an ASCII and a compact binary variant exist; the binary one is what you want for anything above a few hundred thousand points.
Commonly seen in: MeshLab, CloudCompare, RealityCapture, Agisoft Metashape, COLMAP.
| Data | Stored in PLY |
|---|---|
| Geometry | Yes |
| Materials and colour | No |
| Texture maps | No |
| Animation and rigs | No |
| Scene hierarchy | No |
| Read here | Yes |
| Written here | Yes |
Tested against a real file
The last sweep loaded bunny.ply from pyvista/vtk-data with its 2 sidecar files through the viewer on this site: 69,451 triangles across 1 meshes and 1 materials, in 2.0 seconds. Every format's result is on the test results page, run 2026-09-08.
Convert PLY to another format
Every pairing has a page saying what survives the trip.
Convert something else to PLY
Other things to do with a .ply file
Questions about PLY
How do I open a .ply file?
Drop it into the viewer on this site and it opens in the browser, with the scene tree, the materials and the mesh statistics. Nothing is uploaded. If you want it in another program instead, convert it to GLB, which almost everything reads.
Is PLY a good format to archive in?
PLY stores geometry. Anything outside that list will not be in the file at all, so archive the original alongside it if the surfacing or the rig matters.
Does converting PLY lose quality?
Geometry is copied vertex for vertex, so the shape does not degrade. What gets lost is whatever the target format has no field for: convert to STL and the materials go, convert to OBJ and the animation goes. The comparison table on each converter page says exactly which.
Formats that hold the same things
Or go back to the full format reference.