Gif or JPEG?

GIF OR JPEG?

Let me start out by letting you know what you might already know. The two most popular and most widely supported image formats on the web are Gif and JPEG.

Now that you know that, you're half way there.

The only other thing you need to know is when to use which format, and I'll explain that now:

1.Use GIF format with graphics that you have created on your computer such as horizontal rules, buttons, images, or animation.
2.Use JPEG format when the images are scanned pictures, high quality (depth) images, or photographs.

GIF file can contain the maximum of 256 colors (8 bit) or less, which is good for customizing your graphic files. For example, if you create a GIF image of a red arrow you can customize the file to have only two colors, read and white (that is, if white is your background color). This means that the file is very very small because its palette contains only two colors. GIF file will yield a higher quality and smaller size image, compared to JPEG, when it is used with computer generated graphics such as icons, logos, buttons, etc.

JPEG was built to contain 24-bit (16.7+ million colors) and was developed specifically for photographic-style images. JPEG stores the information of images by keeping track of color changes. The advantage of JPEG is that it can carry a smaller file size than GIF when used in storing photographs and images with a wide variety of shading. But, it will not yield a smaller file when dealing with low color level and details like computer generated graphics.

GIFs also has some special features such as animation, transparency, and interlacing.