What are GIF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, JPEG and a BMP files?
April 8th, 2014 by Rossy GuideGIF file:
GIF images are truly the internet standard for any type of small, simple file. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. The most common use for a GIF is for menu buttons or icons for a webpage. The reason being that gif are extremely tiny in file size and have no complex colors, so they load almost instantly on any webpage. Also, any other file which is made up of only use a few basic, flat colors will want to use GIF compression.
PNG file:
PNG (Portable Network Graphics) (1996) is a bitmap image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG was created to both improve upon and replace the GIF format with an image file format that does not require a patent license to use. PNG supports palette based grayscale and RGB images.
JPG or JPEG file:
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) files are a lossy format; the DOS filename extension is JPG (other OS might use JPEG). Nearly every digital camera can save images in the JPEG format, which supports 8 bits per for a 24-bit total, producing relatively small files. When not too great, the compression does not noticeably detract from the image’s quality, but JPEG files suffer generational degradation when repeatedly edited and saved.
TIFF file:
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) file format has not been updated since 1992 and is now owned by Adobe. It can store an image and data in the one file. TIFF can be compressed, but it is rather its ability to store image data in a lossless format that makes a TIFF file a useful image archive, because unlike standard JPEG files, a TIFF file using lossless compression may be edited and re-saved without losing image quality.
BMP file:
BMP (Bitmap) was probably the first type of digital image format that I can remember. Every picture on a computer seemed those days to be a BMP. In Windows XP the Paint program saves its images automatically in BMP. However, in Windows Vista and later images are now saved to JPEG.