Graphic Interchange Format GIF is a type of bitmap image file format which is used for sprite images on the web and in software programs. It was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has gained wide support on the web by attracting a great deal of attention from internet users.
A standard GIF image can contain a maximum of 256 colors because GIFs store image data using indexed color.
GIFs have become popular because they use the LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch) compression method, which is an approach of reducing file size without lowering the quality of the image.
The most distinctive feature of GIFs is the support for animation. Animated GIFs contain some amount of images or frames in a single file and are identified by graphic control extensions.
