| Format introduction | The Graphics Interchange Format (better known by its acronym GIF) is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability. | JPEG is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality. |
| Technical details | GIF supports up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, allowing a single image to reference its own palette of up to 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. GIF images are compressed using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality. | Image files that employ JPEG compression are commonly called "JPEG files", and are stored in variants of the JIF image format. Most image capture devices (such as digital cameras) that output JPEG are actually creating files in the Exif format, the format that the camera industry has standardized on for metadata interchange. |
| File extension | .gif | .jpg, .jpeg, .jpe, .jif, .jfif, .jfi |
| MIME | image/gif | image/jpeg |
| Developed by | CompuServe | Joint Photographic Experts Group |
| Type of format | lossless bitmap image format | lossy image format |
| Associated programs | Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, the GIMP, ImageMagick, IrfanView, Pixel image editor, Paint.NET. | Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, the GIMP, ImageMagick, IrfanView, Pixel image editor, Paint.NET, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer. |
| Wiki | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG |