Images
What is GIF?
Short for Graphics Interchange Format. Also called animated GIF.
GIF is an image format limited to 256 colors that supports simple animation and on-or-off transparency, best known for short looping clips.
How it works
GIF dates from 1987, which explains its limits. Each frame uses a palette of at most 256 colors, and each pixel is either fully visible or fully transparent, with no soft edges. Within those limits, it compresses losslessly and is supported by practically everything.
Its lasting appeal is animation: a GIF can hold many frames with delays between them and loop forever without a video player. That made it the web’s format for reactions and short clips, even though it is very inefficient at storing moving images.
GIF vs PNG vs WebP
For a still graphic, PNG is almost always the better choice: it supports millions of colors and smooth transparency. For animation on a website, animated WebP or a short video is much smaller and looks better. GIF is still the safest choice when an animation has to play in email clients and chat apps that accept nothing else.
A practical example
A five-second screen recording saved as an animated GIF can easily reach 10 MB, while the same clip as a short MP4 video might be under 1 MB.
What to watch out for
GIF’s 256-color limit causes banding and speckled dithering in photographs, and its transparency has hard edges. Convert photos to JPEG and cutouts to PNG instead.
Tools you can use
- Image Converter · Change an image from one format to another
- Image Compressor · Cut file size with a visible quality trade-off
Go a little deeper
- How to reduce image size without losing visible quality
- Why do images save as WebP instead of JPG?
- Why does my transparent PNG have a black background?
- Your HEIC file isn’t broken, Windows just can’t read it
Common questions
Why do GIFs look grainy?
Each frame can use at most 256 colors. Photos contain thousands, so the encoder approximates them with patterns of dots, which appears as grain or banding.
Is GIF lossless?
Its compression is lossless, but reducing an image to 256 colors usually throws information away first. For simple graphics with few colors, the result is exact.
What happens when I convert a GIF to JPG or PNG?
The result is a still image of the first frame. The animation is lost because JPEG and standard PNG hold only one frame.