BizSugar.com › Technology › What is a GIF?

Ah, the GIF. We’ve all seen them. They populate the Internet on blogs and social media, and are part of what makes news and entertainment sites like Buzzfeed very popular.
A GIF (with the file extension, .gif) is basically an image file format that is animated by combining several other images or frames into a single file. This single file is encoded as graphics interchange format (better known as GIF). Unlike the JPEG image format (.jpg), GIFs typically use a compression algorithm referred to as LZW encoding that does not degrade the image quality and allows for easy storing of the file in bytes.