What is the full form of GIF?

The full form of GIF is Graphics Interchange Format. GIF is an image format style bitmap created by a group at BBS (bulletin board service) supplier CompuServe headed by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite on June 15, 1987. GIF is a chain of different bitmap files designed to develop one animated image. It is an eight-bit format that supports a maximum of 256 colours. There are two types of GIF, 87a and 89a.

History of GIF

On June 15, 1987, CompuServe launched GIF to offer their file download region with a colour image format, updating their older black and white RLE (Run-Length Encoding) format. The original version of GIF was called 87a. In 1989, CompuServe released an upgraded version, called 89a, which introduced transparent background colours for animation delays and stored detailed metadata for an application.

Use of GIF

• GIFs are appropriate for a small number of colours such as sharp-edged line art, like logos. It takes advantage of lossy compression of the format, which favours large surfaces of well-defined edges of uniform colour.
• GIFs can be used for games to preserve low-colour sprite information.
• GIFs can be used on tiny animations and video clips of low resolution.