GIF

GIF is a lossless compressed raster format developed by CompuServe in 1987. It is limited to a palette of 256 colors per frame, which makes it suitable for simple graphics, icons, and line art, but poor for photographs. GIF supports simple frame-based animation, a feature that drove its resurgence on social media and messaging platforms in the 2010s. The LZW compression patent expired in the early 2000s, and the format is now fully open.

File extensions	.gif
MIME type	image/gif
Developer	CompuServe
First released	1987
Category	Images
Open standard	Yes

What opens GIF files

• All modern web browsers
• Adobe Photoshop
• GIMP
• Any image viewer

Browse File Formats

Reference details for 53 file formats — extensions, MIME types, what opens each one, and how they convert.

7Z Archives ABW Documents AI Images AVIF Images AZW3 E-books BMP Images CSS Other CSV Spreadsheets DjVu E-books DOC Documents DOCX Documents EPS Images EPUB E-books FB2 E-books GIF Images GZ Archives HEIC Images HTML Documents ICO Images ISO Archives JPG Images JSON Other Keynote Presentations Markdown Documents MOBI E-books Numbers Spreadsheets ODP Presentations ODS Spreadsheets ODT Documents OTF Other Pages Documents PDF Documents PNG Images PPT Presentations PPTX Presentations PSD Images RAR Archives RAW Images RTF Documents SVG Images TAR Archives TeX / LaTeX Documents TIFF Images TSV Spreadsheets TTF Other TXT Documents WebP Images WOFF / WOFF2 Other WPD Documents XLS Spreadsheets XLSX Spreadsheets XML Documents ZIP Archives