⭐ 5 average from 15 votes.
If you’ve been online for more than, say, five minutes, you’ve seen a GIF. Those tiny loops? Under the hood it’s a bitmap format that works with a palette per frame—at most 256 colors. Data is packed with LZW, which is lossless, so saving doesn’t smear the pixels. Back in 1987, CompuServe published the first spec, GIF87a. Then 1989 brought GIF89a with a simple 1-bit transparency trick and basic multi-frame animation. Small files, easy sharing, good-enough color—no wonder GIF became the early web’s workhorse and it’s still hanging around.
Q: What is GIF?
A: GIF is a lossless image format that supports animation.
Q: Supports animation?
A: Yes, GIF can contain multiple frames.