Alcohol fuels such as butanol and ethanol are considered as the alternative or blending fuels to conventional gasoline for fewer emissions and their renewable capability. In this paper the spray structure development and atomization for butanol, ethanol, and isooctane were investigated using a swirl-type inwardly opening gasoline direct-injection (GDI) injector. Two pressures of 7.0 and 10.2 MPa were used for each fuel, and the fuel was injected into a room condition. Transient spray images were taken by using a high-speed camera for visualization and cone angle analysis. Sauter mean diameter (SMD), DV(50), DV(90), and particle size distribution (PSD) were measured using a laser diffraction technique. Results of the transient images clearly show the sac spray at the initial phase (phase 1) and the main spray structure at the developed phase (phase 2). The cone angles at the developed phase for butanol and ethanol are consistently stable, while isooctane presents relatively large fluctuations. The largest cone angle value is observed for ethanol at both injection pressures, while butanol shows the smallest. Higher injection pressure leads to a smaller cone angle for each fuel, among which isooctane shows the largest decrease. In phase 1, isooctane shows a bouncing trend in terms of DV(90), as opposed to butanol and ethanol which show a gradual decrease. In phase 2, all three fuels show consistently smaller droplet size compared to phase 1, suggesting good atomization. A higher injection pressure helps isooctane to reduce the droplet size, meanwhile enabling butanol and ethanol to produce a more uniform PSD, but it does not necessarily induce the droplet size decrease for butanol and ethanol at the current experimental setting.