The GIF image format was developed by Compuserve and is widely used on the Internet due to its high compression (provided by Unisys) and subsequent small file size.

GIF files can be interlaced and animated making them a popular choice for web designers, however, due to the format being limited to only 256 colours the JPEG image format is used for more colour demanding images such as photos.

GIF files have the .gif file extension (click here for more on file extensions) and can be created and/or edited in most popular graphics applications such as Paint Shop Pro.

Animated GIFs which are essentially static images put in a sequence to create the animation can be created in programs such as Macromedia Flash.

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