6 ms·

Am I missing something here? Why would a GIF not still be used? We use them all the time for less detailed images to keep file sizes down?

mseebach 15y ago
I think the GP is confusing an interesting general knowledge piece with something that should be immediately relevant to his day-to-day work. You probably don't want to be crafting GIF binaries directly anyway, there are tons of libraries that take care of the plumbing for you very competently.
simcop2387 15y ago
I've generally avoided GIFs myself, originally because of patents. Lately though it's because with optipng/pngcrush being told to try every possible compression option on them I can usually get small images down to under 500 bytes, sometimes much better than I could ever do with a GIF. This seems to mostly be due to the fact that around certain sizes a true color PNG may compress better than a palleted image.
- chrislomax 15y ago
  Interesting, I wasn't being a dick asking that. I was genuinely interested on what I was missing out on. I don't understand images to anywhere near the extent of most people commenting here but I was interested enough to try and understand the article, "try" being the operative word.
rimantas 15y ago
In most cases you will get better results with PNG. PNG has a slightly bigger overhead, so GIF wins for extremely tiny images (with a size about a dozen pixels or less) but after that more advanced compression algorithm in PNG wins. However, you have to remember to choose the right type of PNG (there is no sense in saving black-and-white lineart as true-color PNG). PNG also may containt chunks of additional info, you can get rid of them too. Also, there is an interesting PNG8 format which allows you to have alpha transparency with indexed color palette in supporting browsers, but in IE6 it will behave just like gif with index transparency (pixels having any transparency will appear completel transparent). See http://www.sitepoint.com/png8-the-clear-winner/ http://www.sitepoint.com/png8-the-clear-winner/
- chrislomax 15y ago
  That is really cool, thanks for the tip Whenever I save an image as a PNG it is almost certainly bigger but I let PS do the work for me these I'll take a look at this format as it seems to be a really clever time saver of having to render a version of each image twice
  - simcop2387 15y ago
    I'd also definitely take a look at some of the png optimizers. They work by tweaking the parameters of the compression so it's a lossless operation (some of them will do some depth reduction in a lossless way if possible, but that doesn't always bring in better compression). Photoshop has been somewhat well known for not always producing an optimized png.

mseebach 15y ago

I think the GP is confusing an interesting general knowledge piece with something that should be immediately relevant to his day-to-day work. You probably don't want to be crafting GIF binaries directly anyway, there are tons of libraries that take care of the plumbing for you very competently.

simcop2387 15y ago

I've generally avoided GIFs myself, originally because of patents. Lately though it's because with optipng/pngcrush being told to try every possible compression option on them I can usually get small images down to under 500 bytes, sometimes much better than I could ever do with a GIF. This seems to mostly be due to the fact that around certain sizes a true color PNG may compress better than a palleted image.

chrislomax 15y ago
Interesting, I wasn't being a dick asking that. I was genuinely interested on what I was missing out on. I don't understand images to anywhere near the extent of most people commenting here but I was interested enough to try and understand the article, "try" being the operative word.

rimantas 15y ago

In most cases you will get better results with PNG. PNG has a slightly bigger overhead, so GIF wins for extremely tiny images (with a size about a dozen pixels or less) but after that more advanced compression algorithm in PNG wins. However, you have to remember to choose the right type of PNG (there is no sense in saving black-and-white lineart as true-color PNG). PNG also may containt chunks of additional info, you can get rid of them too. Also, there is an interesting PNG8 format which allows you to have alpha transparency with indexed color palette in supporting browsers, but in IE6 it will behave just like gif with index transparency (pixels having any transparency will appear completel transparent). See http://www.sitepoint.com/png8-the-clear-winner/ http://www.sitepoint.com/png8-the-clear-winner/

chrislomax 15y ago
That is really cool, thanks for the tip Whenever I save an image as a PNG it is almost certainly bigger but I let PS do the work for me these I'll take a look at this format as it seems to be a really clever time saver of having to render a version of each image twice
- simcop2387 15y ago
  I'd also definitely take a look at some of the png optimizers. They work by tweaking the parameters of the compression so it's a lossless operation (some of them will do some depth reduction in a lossless way if possible, but that doesn't always bring in better compression). Photoshop has been somewhat well known for not always producing an optimized png.