Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your IES file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert IES to another file type
To convert IES photometric files to another format, you need DIALux or other 3D software.
Convert a file to IES
To convert other file formats to the "Lighting Photometric Data" file type, you need software like DIALux or a similar tool.
About IES files
The .IES file format stores photometric data, defining exactly how light radiates from a specific lamp or fixture in the real world. Lighting designers, architects, and 3D artists use it to simulate realistic lighting environments in software like DIALux, Autodesk 3ds Max, or Blender. The format strictly follows the IESNA LM-63 standard. The core disadvantage of .IES files is that they are pure, raw text data. Opening one in a text editor reveals a dense, unreadable matrix of spherical angles and candela values. You cannot see the actual light shape or cone without specialized software. This is highly inconvenient when a client or designer just wants to preview the light web quickly without buying and installing heavy rendering tools. To bypass these limitations, you should convert or process the file. For quick visual previews, convert .IES to PNG or JPG to render a 2D image of the photometric web. If you are working in European architectural pipelines, you will often need to convert it to the LDT (Eulumdat) format. For client handoffs and documentation, generate a PDF report of the lighting specifications.
Convert.Guru analyzes your IES file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert IES file to LDT, PDF, DWG, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG or CONF, you can use DIALux or similar software from the "Photometric Light Distribution Data" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to IES, try DIALux or another comparable tool in the "Photometric Light Distribution Data" category.
The IES Converter Story
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our IES converter.