what type of format is better, .png or .gif?

Answer 1

It totally depends on what you're doing. GIF is a 'lossy' format, which means that you lose quality when you store something as a GIF. However, it does typically result in smaller file sizes --especially when the pic contains a drawing, as opposed to a photographic picture. As extras, GIF supports animation and it allows you to select a color that occurs in the picture, and have it be displayed transparently. (For example: let's say you have a drawing of a cartoon figure and it's draw on a white background. The background of your web page has a lot of different colors. In that case you can select the 'white' in the background of your cartoon figure to be transparent, and thus show the color that your web page has, rather than that white.)

PNG is a lossless format, which means that it does not reduce the quality of the picture. However, the file sizes are often pretty big.

Basically, if you only want to store the picture on your hard disk (and storage space isn't important, because it only costs a couple of cents per megabyte nowadays) then go for PNG because some day you may regret having 'thrown away' the quality of the picture.

However, if you have drawings that you want to display on a website, then it's important that the pic isn't too big (file size-wise) because otherwise it will take visitors to your site too long to download it. In that case it's usually better to choose GIF (if the picture is a drawing/cartoon) or JPG (if the picture is a photographic picture).


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CSANON: EVERY SITE I just checked
(http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/briefing-28/html/
http://iit.bloomu.edu/vthc/ImageReady/basics/formats.htm
and a couple of others) says PNG-8 is lossless. Other than its losslessness I didn't really say anything about PNG, so my post is pretty much correct when it comes to PNG's. From now on, please fail a little bit less miserably when you're accusing someone of not being knowledgeable enough to answer.
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Answer 2

A word to answerers: if you don't know the answer, don't guess or incorrectly respond. Let's see how everyone else before me fails miserably.

Davin: Throws out GIF with no explanation. Flush down the drain.
ckm: Technically correct but useless answer. Are you a Microsoft employee?
have-fun: Admits to not knowing and then answers anyway.
SweetCuriosity: Throws out an answer, then casts doubt by qualifying it with the vague, it actually depends. You don't happen to work for my ISP do you?
jacov: Technically incorrect about PNG. FYI jacov, png-24 is lossless and png-8 is lossy. Usually we assume PNG-8 when you say PNG. The rest of your post is wrong when it comes to PNGs.

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/png-gif

To both expand on and summarize the above link's information:
GIF and PNG (PNG-8) are suitable for pictures with small palettes. This typically includes lineart and images with very few colors. Note that such qualifications throw out photographs, because they are very color rich. PNG-8 beats GIF in every area except two. GIF allows you to have transparency by setting one color as transparent. PNG allows you to have a whole alpha channel. Now all your colors can have varying levels of transparency, and transparency and colors are not tied together. PNG has better compression. Some people think GIF is better, but not quite. What actually happens is that software doesn't compress PNG properly, so it looks better than GIF. Easily fixed with something like PNG Crush (http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/ ), PNG Rewrite (http://entropymine.com/jason/pngrewrite/ ), OptiPNG (http://optipng.sourceforge.net/ ), PNGOut (http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm ), and AdvanceCOMP (http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/ ). PNG allows for gamma correction (GIF doesn't) although gamma correction probably isn't very useful and perhaps detrimental right now.

GIF beats PNG in two areas though. The first is animation. PNG has no support for animation. There are two formats for animation that use PNG, but they aren't used in the mainstream. In other words, PNG has no support for animation. So that leaves you with GIF. The other area that GIF wins is high compatibility. PNG is sufficiently mainstream and very compatible, but if you want to support really old web browsers, really old programs, etc., GIF wins.

Answer 3

PNG has same transparency capabilities of Gif while good quality colours such as Jpeg, however, Gif has animation capabilities.

It depends what you require it. Static images, PNG is good. Animated, GIF would be the go. Most or all browsers support both types.

Answer 4

.GIF but it depends on what image or graphic you want to create.

Answer 5

I don't know but maybe .gif because that's what my class would always use last year in my tech class.

Answer 6

It depends on what you're using the graphic for.

Answer 7

GIF.