Gratitude Day 10: GIF
Thu 10 September 2026
Continuing my "Unsung Heroes, Human and Algorithmic" subseries in my September Gratitude series, I want to talk about GIF, the venerable and stalwart Graphics Interchange Format.
First of all, a little housekeeping: It's pronounced JIF, like the brand of peanut butter. If you insist on pronouncing it like you're having a stroke in the middle of saying "gift," please feel free to leave the room now.
I'll wait.
Ok, now that we've booted the riff-raff, let's get down to business.
GIF was developed by CompuServe and released in 1987 as a compressed, cross-platform (hence the "interchange" part of the name) image format for general-purpose use, and particularly for sharing over online services that were connected to over modem. Most younger folks probably won't appreciate how advanced GIF's compression is, but I remember it taking a minute or two to decompress a 320x200 GIF on my 8MHz Macintosh SE back in the day. I might be partially conflating decompression time with dithering time, but it wasn't fast, by any stretch of the imagination.
For a 1980s format, GIF was actually extremely advanced. Firstly, the compression algorithm used was comparable to that used by real file compression utilities like PKZIP (I hope to delve into the Lempel-Ziv algorithm a little bit in a later post, although I admit much of it is over my head). In addition, it supported up to 256 colors (which only fairly fancy, expensive computers could even display in 1986), and it also supported encoding multiple images in a single file.
Now is the time to dispel some (actually a lot) more misconceptions...
First of all, GIF was not created as an animation format. That is a hack using the multiple images support and (I think) some extra metadata (to control looping and speed), although it was codified as an official mode in 1989, at least according to the Wikipedia article. In 1986, doing animation on a computer was difficult, and the hardware to decompress all of that data, store all of the frames in RAM, and also deal with possible different color palettes per image just didn't exist except in the most advanced home computers. There were some animation formats such as FLI in the late 80s, but they came out a bit later than GIF.
Secondly, the great majority of "Animated GIFs" you see on the internet in 2026 are not GIFs.
GIF is a poor format for animation/video, and the "GIF" services like Giphy* figured that out a long time ago. Most "GIFs" on the internet today are just small, relatively low resolution, soundless MP4 videos. That's why you rarely see dithering in modern "GIFs," because they're not GIF files limited to 256 colors, but true-color videos encoded in the MP4 container format, usually using h.264 or h.265 compression.
* So, I yanked a random "GIF" off of Giphy and discovered that it's actually a WebP animation, not MP4. So, I'm thinking it actually isn't benefitting from the p-frame compression that a proper MP4 file would have, but it at least is getting better (lossy) compression, and full color. When I converted the 283,656 byte example .webp file to GIF with ImageMagick, it grew to 891,341 bytes, a growth of 3.14x
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Still, GIF had its well-deserved heyday, first as a cross-platform (you likely have no idea just how notable that was for the time!) graphics format for online services in the 80s and early 90s, then as the default image format for the Web in the late 90s, then as a way to have small, short animations on websites from the late 90s to the late 2010s (and some to this very day). I don't have (and wouldn't really know where to find) any concrete data on how much GIF is still used on the internet today, but I imagine that it has become far less prevalent in the past decade, although I still occasionally see some GIFs that are truly GIFs.
And so, as someone who has happily used the format since 1990 (although not as frequently nowadays as before), I'd like to take this moment to raise my proverbial mug to the G.O.A.T among graphics format.
Choosy nerds choose GIF!
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