Are mirror images 3 dimensional?

Mirror images are not three dimensional. A three dimensional image must have depth. And I believe I would notice the difference. Photos look very different, especially from the perspective you look at a mirror from.

A mirror doesn’t produce an image it just reflects light. The light is reflected from all angles and contains 3D information and has depth of field which a flat image does not. It is like looking through a window, you see in 3D as if the window wasn’t there. The image is not held on the flat surface of the glass.

Yes I could tell the difference, but they are only 2 dimensional.

Mirrors are two dimensional, however a hologram would have three dimensions.

They two dimensional.
Regarding photo or painting.
A mirror image is a reflection. It is the exact same light reflected off of you that anybody else might see, in two dimensional form. It is the closest thing there is to the original reflection and still not be the original reflection.
A painting or photo are replica images, using media, be it paint or silver emulsion. You would be comparing apples to oranges at that point.

At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, they have a concave and convex mirror set up, and an item reflected. You peer at the image, and you would swear it is there. You shine a small flashlight on it, and the image looks exactly real! It is only when you reach out to touch it you realize you have been duped.
It is completely 3 dimensional.

It’s 3 dimensional by virtue of the fact that the two eyes perceive different spacial relationships between the objects in the image. No motion is necessary to make this happen. The same would not be true of a graphic image.

Two observers looking at a mirror from a different angle (for example, your two eyes) will not see the same picture, because the parallax is different. For a photo, a different angle just distorts the image a bit. You should be able to tell.

Whether a mirror image “is three-dimensional” might be the wrong question. A mirror image is an illusion that’s made of reflected light, so I don’t think it’s the sort of thing that has dimension in that sense.

I think @flutherother has it right. Not only are mirror reflections 3 dimensional, they are like holograms. If something is blocking your view of seeing an object in the mirror, you can move to the side to see the mirror image.

How come when I look at a mirror close up without my glasses, I cant see what is far away (it is blurry) but a painting I can?

It is like taking a picture. If you adjust your lens (camera or eye) to focus on something nearby, what is further away will get blurry.

Yes, mirror images are 3-dimensional. They behave optically exactly as if they were real 3-dimensional objects on the other side of the mirror. (That they are classified as virtual, as opposed to “real” images, is beside the point.)

This brings up the question of why photographs are not 3 dimensional. I have heard the explanation that for something to be seen as 3 dimensional, our two eyes have to receive slightly different images. Why does the mirror do that but not a photograph?

Never mind, I figured it out. Out eyes act like two separate cameras that combine two different images. I will have to read up on how holograms perform this trick.

Of course the mirror is flat, 2-dimensional.
But the image in the mirror has all the characteristics of the 3-d volume on your side. If you change your point-of-view and look into a mirror the image contents change their relative appearance as if they were in the next room volume.
There is different information available from that different angle.

A photograph does not have different information available from a different angle.
You will get parallax differences at different angles but there will be the same information.

A hologram does have different information available from a different angle, hence it’s similarity to the mirror in that respect.