can loadimage windows function be used to load other images other than .bmp images for instance can it load .jpg or .png files?

No. LoadImage cant load anything that's terribly modern. You can load bmp, .ico, .cur and that's about it. Since over 10 years now Windows has included the GDI+ subsystem, which is more or less, an object-oriented, improved version of GDI. GDI+ can load these other images without a problem - loading anything that Windows will display natively - including png, jpg, emf, wmf and a bunch of others.

Doing so is rather trivial - See below for an example of use. Make sure you link against the Gdiplus library. Also note, you just need to startup/shutdown Gdi+ once per program, which makes my example essentially a 1 line program that uses gdi+.

#include <gdiplus.h>

using namespace Gdiplus;

// BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, Exif, WMF, and EMF
HBITMAP mLoadImageFile(wchar_t *filename)
{
    HBITMAP result = NULL;
    Bitmap bitmap(filename, false);
    bitmap.GetHBITMAP(0, &result);
    return result;
}

int main()
{
    GdiplusStartupInput gdiplusStartupInput;
    ULONG_PTR           gdiplusToken;
    GdiplusStartup(&gdiplusToken, &gdiplusStartupInput, NULL);

    HBITMAP mBkgImg = mLoadImage(L"forrest.jpg");

   	GdiplusShutdown(gdiplusToken);

}