In 2012, the American wing of the Oxford University Press recognized GIF as a verb as well, meaning "to create a GIF file", as in "GIFing was the perfect medium for sharing scenes from the Summer Olympics". Terminology Īs a noun, the word GIF is found in the newer editions of many dictionaries. In January 2018 Instagram also added GIF stickers to the story mode. In May 2015 Facebook added support for GIF. The optional interlacing feature, which stores image scan lines out of order in such a fashion that even a partially downloaded image was somewhat recognizable, also helped GIF's popularity, as a user could abort the download if it was not what was required. The feature of storing multiple images in one file, accompanied by control data, is used extensively on the Web to produce simple animations. In September 1995 Netscape Navigator 2.0 added the ability for animated GIFs to loop. GIF was one of the first two image formats commonly used on Web sites, the other being the black-and-white XBM. By December 1987, for example, an Apple IIGS user could view pictures created on an Atari ST or Commodore 64. The two versions can be distinguished by looking at the first six bytes of the file (the " magic number" or signature), which, when interpreted as ASCII, read "GIF87a" and "GIF89a", respectively.ĬompuServe encouraged the adoption of GIF by providing downloadable conversion utilities for many computers. incorporating text labels as text (not embedding them in the graphical data),īut as there is little control over display fonts, this feature is not widely used.
The Graphics Interchange Format ( GIF / ɡ ɪ f/ GHIF or / dʒ ɪ f/ JIF, see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987.