what does it mean gif

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, which 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 June 15, 1987. GIFs are suitable for sharp-edged line art with a limited number of colors, such as logos, and can also be used to store low-color sprite data for games. They can be used for small animations and low-resolution video clips, or as reactions in online messaging used to convey emotion and feelings instead of using words. Because GIF is a lossless data compression format, meaning that no information is lost in the compression, it quickly became a popular format for transmitting and storing graphic files. Facebook and Twitter both support animated GIFs.