What is a GIF (.gif)?
GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format, and was developed by/for Compuserve for compact storage of images. As most Compuserve customers didn’t have very fancy screens in the early days of the service, the developers decided to use a “palette” of up to 256 colors for each image, which allows an image to take up one-third as much space. They also used a compression algorithm to further reduce the size of image files. GIFS are excellent for storing created images with 256 or fewer colors, especially if there are large regions of solid color and sharp borders between colors. GIFs also support transparency and animation. Transparency requires choosing a “transparent color” – a color which will be rendered transparent anywhere it appears in the image. Animation consists of storing multiple frames in the same file, along with time-delay information and repeat information.
