Choosing GIF

Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, is a popular Web graphic format. Although it can contain only 256 colors, GIF offers good, lossless image compression. Also, GIFs can contain a transparent area and multiple frames for animation.

Images compressed with lossless compression normally lose no image quality when they are compressed. A GIF compresses by scanning horizontally across a row of pixels, finding solid areas of color, and then abbreviating identical areas of pixels in the file.

Therefore, images with repetitive areas of solid color compress best when exported as GIFs. A GIF is usually ideal for cartoon-like graphics, logos, graphics with transparent areas, and animations.

Note: Dithering or anti-aliasing GIF images produces larger files.