The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; GHIF or JIF, see § Pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on June 15, 1987. The format can contain up to 8 bits per pixel, allowing a single image to reference its own palette of up to 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It can also represent multiple images in a file, which can be used for animations, and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame. These palette limitations make GIF less suitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with color gradients, but well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color. GIF images are compressed using the Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality. While once in widespread usage on the World Wide Web because of its wide implementation and portability between applications and operating systems, usage of the format has declined for space and quality reasons, often being replaced with newer formats such as PNG for static images and MP4 for videos. In this context, short video clips are sometimes termed "GIFs" despite having no relation to the original file format.
History
CompuServe introduced GIF on 15 June 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas. This replaced their earlier run-length encoding format, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because it used Lempel–Ziv–Welch data compression. Since this was more efficient than the run-length encoding used by PCX and MacPaint, fairly large images could be downloaded reasonably quickly even with slow modems. The original version of GIF was called 87a. This version already supported multiple images in a stream. In 1989, CompuServe released an enhanced version, called 89a, This version added:
support for animation delays transparent background colors storage of application-specific metadata allowing text labels as text (not embedding them in the graphical data). However, this feature is rarely used. Modern browsers do not support it, and there is little control over fonts and styling. The two versions can be distinguished by looking at the first six bytes of the file (the "magic number" or signature), which, when interpreted as ASCII, read "GIF87a" or "GIF89a", respectively. CompuServe encouraged the adoption of GIF by providing downloadable conversion utilities for many computers. By December 1987, for example, an Apple IIGS user could view pictures created on an Atari ST or Commodore 64. GIF was one of the first two image formats commonly used on Web sites, the other being the black-and-white XBM. In September 1995, Netscape Navigator 2.0 added the ability for animated GIFs to loop. While GIF was developed by CompuServe, it used the Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) lossless data compression algorithm patented by Unisys in 1985. Controversy over the licensing agreement between Unisys and CompuServe in 1994 spurred the development of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) standard. In 2004, all patents relating to the proprietary compression used for GIF expired. The feature of storing multiple images in one file, accompanied by control data, is used extensively on the Web to produce simple animations. The optional interlacing feature, which stores image scan lines out of order in such a fashion that even a partially downloaded image was somewhat recognizable, also helped GIF's popularity, as a user could abort the download if it was not what was required. In May 2015 Facebook added support for GIF. In 2014, Twitter, also added support to GIF as well as Instagram in 2018. In 2016, the Internet Archive released a searchable library of GIFs from their GeoCities archive.
Terminology As a noun, the word GIF is found in the newer editions of many dictionaries. In 2012, the American wing of the Oxford University Press recognized GIF as a verb as well, meaning "to create a GIF file", as in "GIFing was the perfect medium for sharing scenes from the Summer Olympics". The press's lexicographers voted it their word of the year, saying that GIFs have evolved into "a tool with serious applications including research and journalism".
Pronunciation
The pronunciation of the first letter of GIF has been disputed since the 1990s. The most common pronunciations in English are (with a soft g as in gin) and (with a hard g as in gift), differing in the phoneme represented by the letter G. The creators of the format pronounced the acronym GIF as , with a soft g, with Wilhite stating that he intended for the pronunciation to deliberately echo the American peanut butter brand Jif, and CompuServe employees would often quip "choosy developers choose GIF", a spoof of Jif's television commercials. However, the word is widely pronounced as , with a hard g, and polls have generally shown that this hard g pronunciation is more prevalent. Dictionary.com cites both pronunciations, indicating as the primary pronunciation, while Cambridge Dictionary of American English offers only the hard-g pronunciation. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and Oxford Dictionaries cite both pronunciations, but place the hard g first: . The New Oxford American Dictionary gave only in its second edition but updated it to in the third edition. The disagreement over the pronunciation has led to a heated Internet debate. On the occasion of receiving a lifetime achievement award at the 2013 Webby Awards ceremony, Wilhite publicly rejected the hard-g pronunciation; his speech led to more than 17,000 posts on Twitter and dozens of news articles. The White House and the TV program Jeopardy! also entered the debate in 2013. In February 2020, The J.M. 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" (hashtagged as #JIFvsGIF) 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.
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