Free animated GIFs

This hub is about computer animated images. They are in Graphics Interchange Format - GIF and is widely used for smal animation pictures on websites also known as Animated Gifs. Usualy, they are used as animated cartoons, animated people, animals, lines, dots, lights, signs, text banners etc.

CompuServe introduced bitmap image format known as Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) in 1987. This type of pictures are beside jpeg, the only format used on the World Wide Web.

Unfortunatelly, Hubpages dont allow GIF images with Animation, so there is no such image on this Hub. But you can see here pictures of animated animals.

GIF is abbreviation for Graphics Interchange Format. This is format for images used on internet because it is very portable and it it widely used. - one third of images on www are in this format.

Format supports up to 8 bits per pixel - so you can use 256 different colors. Special thing is, that it supports animations with separate palette of 256 colors for each frame of animation.
Because of such a low number of colors, it is used mostly for very simple images such as logos, that have bigger areas with same color.

GIF images are using Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression - LZW. This compression technique is without any loss of information wich means, that we can reduce size of the file without degrading image quality.

• GIF-s are used for pictures with sharp edges lines and with small number of colors (JPEG is used for pictures with smoother edges and more colors)
• GIF-s can be used as game data.
• GIF-s are used for animations and short video clips.
• because it has only 256 colors it can not be succesfully used for digital photography. For digital photography are used TIFF, RAW or the JPEG.
• Alternative format for GIF is PNG. PNG uses better compression techniques without a limit of 256 colors. But it does not support animations.