Published : 6 years ago, on 07/09/2018

The world is changing and so does our ways of communication. Initially hand written letters were used to express the feelings or to reach out to our near and dear ones. As the time changes, letters were replaced by emails. With the entry of multimedia phones, a new way of communication came into being, which was termed as SMS, or short message service. Then came the giant leap in era of technology and smart phones took over the market by storm. Smartphones paved the way, for various chatting apps, such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram etc, without taking away the option of sending emails and SMS.

When the ways of communication were getting enhanced then why would the way of expressing remain behind. All these new chatting apps, brings in the interesting way to express yourself, which was not only limited to words. There is no need to type a paragraph or to think of suitable words, just go through the end numbers of smileys and gifs available with the chatting options, to express what you feel.

You all must have heard about memes and gifs, let’s understand what gifs actually stands for.

Gif means Graphics Interchange Format. Gif is created by placing various images together and then short is created out of it. Output comes is in the form of a video which keeps playing repeatedly and doesn’t have any sound.

Length of the gif is short and quality is also not that high, that’s why the size of the file remain small, which ultimately make it perfect to be used online, during your chats on social media. Reaction visuals created by gif are interesting and entertaining as well.

What actually is the gif File?

Gif is a file format of an image, where the animation is created by joining various frames or images in the single file. Now, this file which is a single file gets encoded as the gif or graphics interchange format. Different to what is done in the format of JPEG image, gifs make use of the compression algorithm, which is also referred as the LZW encoding. This doesn’t get the image quality degraded and ensures that file is stored easily in bytes.

More than one image within the single file of gif are displayed in such a way that it creates the short movie or an animated clip. Series of images are displayed by animated gifs by default, only once, stopping at the time, when last frame or image is displayed. This can continue for a long time or may be it can get stopped after displaying few sequences.

Invention and development of gif

Steve Wilhite is the person, who created the gif graphics at CompuServe in the year 1987. But since its inception there is a debate going on how to pronounce it, whether they pronounce it as ‘jif’ like in peanut butter or should it be pronounced as ‘gif’ with the ‘g’ pronounced as in the word gift. Though commonly people pronounce it as ‘gif’ with the hard G, but the one who created the word himself, Steve Wilhite insist on its pronunciation as ‘jif’.

What is the function of gif?

Gifs are used often as statements, comments and replies in the conversations going on online and for also the bite-sized entertainment. Gifs are used generally for conveying the reactions and explaining the concepts in funny way.