A popular amateur approach to animation is via the animated GIF format, which can be uploaded and seen on the web easily.

The Graphics Interchange Format ( GIF ; or ) is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.

The color limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

CompuServe introduced the GIF format in 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas, replacing their earlier run-length encoding ( RLE ) format, which was black and white only.

The original version of the GIF format was called 87a.

The creators of the format pronounced GIF with a soft " G " as in " gin ".

According to Steve Wilhite, the creator of the GIF format, the original pronunciation deliberately echoes the American peanut butter brand, Jif, and the employees of CompuServe would often say " Choosy developers choose GIF ", spoofing this brand's television commercials.

* In view of the general limitation on the GIF image palette to 256 colors, it is not usually used as a format for digital photography.

The full detail of the file format is covered in the GIF specification.

Paint does not make optimal use of the GIF format ; due to the unnecessarily large color table ( storing a full 256 colors instead of the used 2 ) and symbol width, this GIF file is not an efficient representation of the 15-pixel image ( illustrated enlarged above ).

Uncompressed GIF can also be a useful intermediate format for a graphics programmer because individual pixels are accessible for reading or painting.

Complete support for the GIF format is complicated chiefly by the complex canvas structure it allows, though this is what enables the compact animation features.

Animated GIF remains widely used, as many applications are capable of creating the files, and it remains the only animated image format supported in nearly all modern web browsers without the use of a plug-in.

* Free scores of Brahms Lieder and orchestral works in GIF format from the Variations Project at Indiana University.

* MOS 6510 datasheet ( GIF format, zipped )

PNG was created to improve upon and replace GIF ( Graphics Interchange Format ) as an image-file format not requiring a patent license.

It was the native file format for PC Paintbrush ( PCX = " Personal Computer Exchange ") and became one of the first widely accepted DOS imaging standards, although it has since been succeeded by more sophisticated image formats, such as GIF, JPEG and PNG.

Deflate is widely thought to be free of any subsisting patents and was so at a time before the patent on LZW ( which is used in the GIF file format ) expired.

The GIF image format also incorporated LZW compression in this way, and Unisys later claimed royalties on implementations of GIF.

A GIF marked 87a may contain extension blocks ; the intent is that a decoder can read and display the file without the features covered in extensions it does not understand.

Note that due to the reduced number of colors in the image, there are obvious display issues. GIF is palette-based: the colors used in an image ( a frame ) in the file have their RGB values defined in a palette table that can hold up to 256 entries, and the data for the image refer to the colors by their indexes ( 0 – 255 ) in the palette table.

While not part of the GIF specification, dithering can of course be used in images subsequently encoded as GIF images.

Although GIF is not often used for truecolor images ( as it was not designed for that purpose ), there are at least two methods that can generate 24-bit RGB truecolor images when decoded correctly.

Another technique uses the transparency feature introduced in GIF89a: a GIF file can be constructed as a series of overlapping full-screen images, each image filling in colors from a local color table that weren't in the previous ones.

The GIF encoding process can be modified to create a file that is without LZW compression but still viewable as a GIF image.

PNG files can be much larger than GIF files in situations where a GIF and a PNG file were created from the same high-quality image source, as PNG is capable of storing more color depth and transparency information than GIF.

Fluid layouts developed around 2000 as a replacement for HTML-table-based layouts, as a rejection of grid-based design both as a design principle, and as a coding technique, but were very slow to be adopted .< ref group =" note " >- based markup and spacer. GIF images </ ref > The axiomatic assumption is that readers will have screen devices, or windows thereon, of different sizes and that there is nothing the page designer can do to change this.

The PNG and to a lesser degree, GIF formats are suitable, and JPEG is notable for not being so-the lossy nature of JPEG compression often mars some of the finer details of sprites, but more importantly, can shift the colors of a sprite's pixels.

In Windows XP and later versions, Paint is based on GDI + and therefore, images can be natively saved as JPEG, GIF, TIFF and PNG without requiring additional graphics filters ( in addition to BMP ).

The interface tends towards a minimalist, high performance environment directly supporting XPM, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF and PPM icons with an alpha-channel and a right-click, sliding-scrolling application menu system which can throw off pinnable menus, along with window-icon miniaturization and other animations on multiple desktops.

One color entry in a single GIF or PNG image's palette can be defined as " transparent " rather than an actual color.

Web browsers can display standard internet image formats including GIF, JPEG, and PNG.

For example, one can convert a GIF file to a JPEG file.

Fireworks can export images to multiple file formats including PNG, JPEG, GIF, Animated GIF, TIFF, SWF, BMP, WBMP and PDF.

For example, a GIF file can contain multiple images, and headers are used to identify and describe each block of image data.

The program can open and convert vector formats from CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator and can open other formats, including PNG, JPG and GIF files — as well as competing photo editor formats from Photoshop, GIMP and Paint Shop Pro.

The difference with the GIF image, is that the SVG image will be parsed within the SGML document, according to the declarations in the DTD, where the GIF image is just referenced as an opaque external object ( which is not parsable with SGML ) via its " data " attribute ( whose value type is an opaque ENTITY ).

GIF became popular because it used LZW data compression, which was more efficient than the run-length encoding that formats such as PCX and MacPaint used, and fairly large images could therefore be downloaded in a reasonably short time, even with very slow modems.

The standard GIF decoder processing an uncompressed GIF will not be prevented from writing strings to its table but the code width must never increase since that triggers a different packing of bits to bytes.

The GIF standard allows such extra CLEAR codes at to be inserted in the image data at any time.

The latest group of web browsers and web pages tend to employ a heavy amount of client-side scripting, accounting for an improved user interface in which the user does not experience the unfriendly " refreshing " of the web page, but instead sees perhaps an animated GIF file indicating that the request occurred and the page will be updated shortly.

In the Windows 98, Windows 2000 or Windows Me versions of Paint, images could be saved in JPEG and GIF and PNG formats if the necessary Microsoft graphics filters were installed, usually by another Microsoft application such as Microsoft Office or Microsoft PhotoDraw.

Charles Foster Johnson | Charles Johnson's animated GIF image comparing what CBS claimed to be a 1973-era typewritten memo with a proportional-spaced 2004-era Microsoft Word document made with default settingsThe Killian documents controversy ( also referred to as Memogate, Rathergate or Ra < sup > th </ sup > ergate < ref >

The X Window System was one of the earliest systems to include support for an arbitrary image as wallpaper via the xsetroot program, which at least as early as the X10R3 release in 1985 could tile the screen with any solid color or any binary-image X BitMap file .< ref > X10R3, X. org downloads,: xsetroot program attributed to " Tony Della Fera, DEC ", dated " 28-Nov-84 ".</ ref > In 1989, a free software program called xgifroot was released that allowed an arbitrary color GIF image to be used as wallpaper, and in the same year the free xloadimage program was released which could display a variety of image formats ( including color images in Sun Rasterfile format ) as the desktop background.