Decide which of the file formats is more suitable for your web project

GIF format is most often associated with avatars. Indeed, this format is the only one that allows animation, and practically any small moving object in the internet is one of the GIF files. But the GIF format is used for other purposes too – it is great for saving images of limited colors (supporting 256 as the maximum number) or images when colors are uniform – logos, line art, etc. Its compression method is lossless, so editing GIF images you preserve every pixel. Small, moving, lossless – what else would one need for the web use? The answer is simple – GIF format is not good for images containing lots of colors. In this case GIF should be converted to JPEG supporting millions of those. JPEG is far better for photographs. It gives better quality images. The main advantage of JPEG is that the file size of photographs and images containing various colors and shades will be smaller than GIF. But there is no way for JPEG to produce a small sized image where the range of colors is not as wide, and where one has to edit detailed computer generated images where GIF will be more appropriate.