What is PGM?
PGM is the greyscale member of the Netpbm family: a three-line header, then one brightness value per pixel with no compression. It is what image-processing courses, OCR pipelines and computer-vision tools pass around when they want a format with no decoder in the way.
What is ICO?
ICO is the Windows icon container, and still what a browser fetches when it asks a site for /favicon.ico. One file can hold several sizes at once so the system can pick the right one; each dimension is stored in a single byte, which caps an icon at 256 pixels.