GIF file format

The GIF format is a rather old graphics format. It was designed by Compuserve to store images in a way that keeps the files as short as possible, because they were to be transported by modem data lines.

GIF can represent up to 256 colors in images. The smaller the number of colors, the shorter the files usually come out. GIF is not good to store photographic images (except you use black and white photography, where you use 256 shades of gray). GIF is good for two kinds of designs:

Graphical Designs:

buttons, symbols and other things that come with a number of colors less than 256

High contrast images:

GIF works very well with high contrast between neighbor pixels. JPEG (see below) has a problem with high contrast.

GIF is a compressing, non-lossy image format. Compressing means that the file will be shorter on disk than is used to be in memory, and non-lossy just means the image will not lose quality. The color coding GIF uses is indexed color as described on page . To use GIF images on the Web, their file names must end with '.gif'.