No matter what kind of website you have, or what kind of website you are planning on building, images are a huge part of what makes a site successful. Even if you are just starting a web page for your family and you are going to be uploading family photographs, you want those photographs to display rich color and still be small enough that people can save them if they want. Currently, there are four major file formats in use: .jpg, .gif, .png and .tif. Which one should you use for your website? Let’s find out!
Of all of the image formats for the web, .jpg is still the best known by computer experts and novices, alike. JPGs are capable of 24-bit color and 8-bit greyscale, but if you are going for pure picture quality, you probably want to stay away from JPG. What has made JPG so popular is that it is the smallest of all image formats for the web, which makes it an obvious choice for people who want to save space or reduce costs for hosting. If you simply want to upload some photos fast and you don’t care if you maximize their color appearance, then JPG is a fine file format, but if you want to make the most out of each picture, keep reading.
It wasn’t that long ago that the TIF file format was widely considered to be the standard for image formats for the web. TIF is often a good choice because it not only offers 24 bit color but also 48 bit color for a clarity that is simply amazing. The only real draw back with TIF is that the file sizes tend to be huge. In the past, business websites or websites that sought to look their best simply accepted this and paid the price for heavy hosting bills. Today, there is an alternative to the TIF format, although many websites still choose to use this beautiful and still popular file format.
The new kid on the block when it comes to image formats for the web is PNG. Just like TIF, PNG is capable of both 24-bit color as well as 48-bit color, but unlike the TIF format, PNGs aren’t much larger than JPGs. Five years ago, no one had really heard of PNG files, but now, they have taken the Internet by storm. They offer a rich color depth, a portable file size and maximum compatibility over different types of computers, including Windows PCs, Linux and Mac. You may still have some purists out there that feel that TIF is the way to go, but there is a very strong movement afoot to replace TIF with PNG for good.
Finally, it wasn’t that long ago that everyone was in love with the GIF file format. The file sizes were obscenely large, but at the time, the clarity was beautiful. By today’s standards, GIF has been all but put out to pasture. It is capable of no more than 8-bit color, so needless to say, no one really uses it any more. As a matter of fact, if your website has any GIF files still on it, you can save a huge amount of space by switching them over to PNG. Of all of the image formats for the web, GIF is the least popular by far.
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