JPEGs
Short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and pronounced “jaypeg”.
JPEGs are for photographs.
GIFs
Short for Graphics Interchange Format and pronounced “giff” or “jiff” (personally, WebSanity says “giff”).
GIFs or PNGs are best for illustrations, like logos.
GIFs can be animated, but this is highly annoying to most website visitors, so do not animate GIFs!
PNGs
Short for Portable Network Graphics and pronounced “ping”.
GIFs or PNGs are best for illustrations.
PNGs vs. GIFs
- If you have a small image, a GIF can be much smaller than a PNG. On larger images, however, PNGs will be smaller than GIFs.
- PNGs offer many more transparency options than GIFs.
- GIFs are limited to 256 colors, while PNGs have much wider ranges of colors.
- GIFs can be animated (not that you should!) but PNGs cannot.
Other image formats
Other graphical formats—BMP, PSD, TIFF, & RAW, for example—cannot be viewed directly inside Web browsers, because Web browsers cannot display them. If you need to make images in those formats available to users, you’ll need to upload them and then embed links to those files in your webpages.
