14 Facts About Animated GIF

Animated GIF images are compressed using the Lempel–Ziv–Welch lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality.

CompuServe encouraged the adoption of Animated GIF by providing downloadable conversion utilities for many computers.

Animated GIF was one of the first two image formats commonly used on Web sites, the other being the black-and-white XBM.

Smucker Company, the owners of the Jif brand, partnered with the animated image database and search engine Giphy to release a limited-edition "Jif vs GIF" jar of peanut butter that had a label humorously declaring the soft-g pronunciation to refer exclusively to the peanut butter, and GIF to be exclusively pronounced with the hard-g pronunciation.

Conceptually, a Animated GIF file describes a fixed-sized graphical area populated with zero or more "images".

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Many Animated GIF files have a single image that fills the entire logical screen.

Animated GIF files start with a fixed-length header giving the version, followed by a fixed-length Logical Screen Descriptor giving the pixel dimensions and other characteristics of the logical screen.

Additionally, not all Animated GIF rendering programs handle tiled or layered images correctly.

Uncompressed Animated GIF can be a useful intermediate format for a graphics programmer because individual pixels are accessible for reading or painting.

The Animated GIF standard allows such extra CLEAR codes to be inserted in the image data at any time.

Each frame in an animation Animated GIF is introduced by its own GCE specifying the time delay to wait after the frame is drawn.

Unisys became aware that the version of Animated GIF used the LZW compression technique and entered into licensing negotiations with CompuServe in January 1993.

Unisys stated that they expected all major commercial on-line information services companies employing the LZW patent to license the technology from Unisys at a reasonable rate, but that they would not require licensing, or fees to be paid, for non-commercial, non-profit Animated GIF-based applications, including those for use on the on-line services.

Complete support for Animated GIF is complicated chiefly by the complex canvas structure it allows, though this is what enables the compact animation features.