Learn English – Difference between “movie”, “film” and “motion picture”

As with many things in programming, the specific definitions of these words will be tied directly to whatever IDE you're using. That being said, the general experience I've had with these words in programming have been:

• image, in general, tends to be a fairly general term. It can refer to a photograph, a line drawing, a logo, text rendered in an image format, etc.

• glyph, on the other hand, is usually close to the typographic sense of the word "A representation of a letter, character, or symbol". Examples might be company logos, stylized lettering as a header, etc. I've never seen it used for a photograph (well, potentially a photograph of a logo).

If the two are used in the same setup, my expectation would be that image would actually serve a less general role, instead representing pictures that were not glyphs.

The OED defines them as (note these are only partial entries, as both words have several meanings. However these seemed to be the ones more appropriate for this discussion):

picture: An individual painting, drawing, or other representation on a surface, of an object or objects; esp. such a representation as a work of art. (Now the prevailing sense.)

image: An optical appearance or counterpart of an object, such as is produced by rays of light either reflected as from a mirror, refracted as through a lens, or falling on a surface after passing through a small aperture.    Such an appearance may also be a mere subjective impression on the sense of sight, as an after-image (q.v.), and the negative image or accidental image seen after looking intently at a bright-coloured object, and having a colour complementary to that of the object. An image produced by reflexion or refraction is called in Optics a real image when the rays from each point of the object actually meet at a point, a virtual image when they diverge as if from a point beyond the reflecting or refracting body.

So I guess image refers more to the optical process, while picture is the actual painting/printed photograph etc.

Of course image is also used to refer to image files in informatics.