animated GIF

animated GIF

A moving picture in GIF format, which is made up of a series of frames. When displayed, they provide an animated sequence that cycles over and over without stopping. Although popular on the Web, animated GIFs are larger than single-frame GIFs and take longer to download. Typically used for ad banners, the animation is usually confined to small areas of the image to keep the file size short. Very different than GIF and much more sophisticated, Flash is popular on the Web for instructional sequences as well as animations of all kind. Flash is an interactive format and its vector images take up much less space than GIF's bitmapped images. See Flash and GIF.

GIF Animator

Ulead's GIF Animator was used to compose this five frame GIF, which makes the image expand out of the upper left corner. First created in an image editor, the frames are inserted in order into GIF Animator. Each frame can be given a delay; for example, frames 1 through 4 were given a quarter second delay.

The Animation

This is the animated GIF created in the animator software above.

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(graphics, file format)

Animated GIF - (GIF89a) A variant of the GIF image format, often used on World-Wide Web pages to provide moving icons and banners. The GIF89a format supports multiple "frames" that give the impression of motion when displayed in sequence, much like a flip book. The animation may repeat continuously or play once. Animated GIFs aren't supported by earlier web browsers, however the first frame of the image is still shown. There are many utilities to create animated GIFs from a sequence of individual GIF files. There are also utilities that will produce animated GIFs automatically from a piece of text or a single image. One problem with this format is the size of the files produced, as they are by definition a sequence of individual images. Apart from minimising the number of frames, the best way to decrease file size is to assist the LZW compression by using blocks of solid colour, avoid dithering, and use fewer colours. If areas of an image don't change from one frame to another, they don't need to be redrawn so make the area a transparent block in the second frame.