In last month's Tips and Tricks Newsletter we showed you how to greatly reduce your image sizes to save hosting space. We took a 2MB file right off our digital camera and got it down to 24KB by resizing and reducing quality - allowing you to upload 97 images in place of just one. If you missed or would like to re-read last month's Tips and Tricks you can do so here. Just a quick side note, did you know that you can find past issues of Tips and Tricks here?
This month we are going to talk about saving as a GIF. First, I want to clear up any confusion - an image you take with your digital camera should never be saved as a GIF (more on this below). This Tips and Tricks will teach you how and when to save as a GIF rather than a JPG.
What is a GIF?
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format.
"The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel, allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame. The color limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color." Wikipedia
As you can see from the text above, there are limitations when savings as a GIF. A GIF only supports up to 256 colors - this is why you should never save photos from your digital camera as a GIF, or any color photograph for that matter. Not only would a color photograph saved as a GIF look worse but the file size could also be larger than if you had of saved as a JPG, yikes! It really is all about learning to use the right format for the right images. Just a note, while GIFs can only have 256 colors - it can be any colors, you are not restricted to web safe colors.
See the choppy lines in the sky on the GIF?
GIFs work awesome for stuff like logos/text/computer drawings - images with few and solid colors. For stuff like logos saving as a GIF will result in a cleaner looking image as well as giving you the smallest file size.
Samples of GIFs
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