What is the difference between gif, bmp and jpeg files?

sequoianoir

Method of storage and compression of data Nov 22 03, 2:42 PM

mk2norwich

That's a surprisingly short answer coming from you, Dark Bark! I expected the usual reams and reams of text, as per your usual style! Are you feeling 'off' today, or have you been drinking a bit, in celebration of something? ;-) Nov 22 03, 2:46 PM

sequoianoir

No Norry, about to have a glass or 2 of wine shortly. Re the answer. To answer it fully would take reams and reams of text. At the end of the day it doesn't really matter. When storing a "picture" or "video" it is always a trade off between quality and quantity. The best takes oodles of storage and needs power to process it. Using compression helps, but smaller data means smaller image size, or number of colours or resolution etc. Nov 22 03, 2:55 PM

lothruin

Although worth mentioning is a significant difference between jpg and gif, that jpg is a "lossy" file, in other words, every time you save a given image some of the data is lost in compression, so the image gets slightly distorted every time it is saved. Nov 22 03, 6:48 PM

harish_256

GIF images can have a maximum of 256 colours, and from what I've seen, they're used typically for low-resolution graphics that employ minimum colours. (GIF = Graphics Interchange Format) Photographs and other high-quality images usually employ JPEG extensions (JPG, JFIF, JPEG, etc.) JPEG. JPEG is an acronym of 'Joint Photographic Experts' Group'. From what I've seen, GIF, JPEG and PNG are the only extensions used on the internet. Bitmap -- God knows what its speciality is, but MS Paint seems to be the onlly program that employs it! I've heard that TIFF is extremely high quality but the file size is also very high. Used for printing images. Nov 23 03, 2:49 AM