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The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; / ɡ ɪ f / GHIF or / dʒ ɪ f / JIF, see § Pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on June 15, 1987.
Steve Wilhite's slide at the 2013 Webby Awards. The pronunciation of GIF, an acronym for the Graphics Interchange Format, has been disputed since the 1990s.Popularly rendered in English as a one-syllable word, the acronym is most commonly pronounced / ɡ ɪ f / ⓘ (with a hard g as in gig) or / dʒ ɪ f / ⓘ (with a soft g as in gin), differing in the phoneme represented by the letter G.
A GIF is an example of a graphics image file that uses a bitmap. [ 2 ] As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a particular bitmapping application: the pix-map , which refers to a map of pixels , where each pixel may store more than two colors, thus using more than one bit per pixel.
For example, graphically simple images (i.e. images with large continuous regions like line art or animation sequences) may be losslessly compressed into a GIF or PNG format and result in a smaller file size than a lossy JPEG format. For example, a 640 × 480 pixel image with 24-bit color would occupy almost a megabyte of space:
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 9 February 2025. Computer graphics images defined by points, lines and curves This article is about computer illustration. For other uses, see Vector graphics (disambiguation). Example showing comparison of vector graphics and raster graphics upon magnification Vector graphics are a form of computer ...
Smallest element of a raster image. Planar image format An image format where the image channels (or even bits) for a single pixel is separated into several parallel arrays, equivalent to a structure of arrays for bitmap data. Point cloud A surface defined by a collection of vertices without connectivity information. [20] Point sprite
When converting an image from the PNG format to GIF, the image quality may suffer due to posterization if the PNG image has more than 256 colors. GIF intrinsically supports animated images. PNG supports animation only via unofficial extensions (see the section on animation, above). PNG images are less widely supported by older browsers.
For example, a GIF file can contain multiple images, and headers are used to identify and describe each block of image data. The leading bytes of the header would contain text like GIF87a or GIF89a that can identify the binary as a GIF file. If a binary file does not contain any headers, it may be called a flat binary file.