#LOADING GIF LOOP TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND MP4#

Today, you could hardly escape GIFs if you tried - they’re everywhere. Once they hit smart phone keypads, there was no stopping them. Whole platforms developed just to collect and share them. Designers and artists began exploring what they could do with them. Social media sites stopped shunning them. Technical quality improved and they became easier to create. But, somewhere between the birth of YouTube and the expansion of broadband - as the internet began to catch fire - they started coming into their own. The earliest animated GIFs were so crude that no serious web developer would consider using them. (That’s why it’s called an animated GIF instead, or a GIF animation.) But they are so useful for that one purpose that they’re now one of the most popular formats for images that will appear mainly on the internet. A GIF isn’t the same thing as a video - no audio, for starters. Today, though, we think of them primarily as short, looping animations. GIFs were well enough suited for their original purpose: displaying logos, line art, charts, and such on the web. One day, someone realized that if you put a series of images into a GIF and sequenced them properly, you would have a simple animation. Although the format was developed to display basic graphics, it can hold more than one image at a time. (In fact, GIFs were actually born two years before the World Wide Web.) As a relic of chat rooms, MySpace, and dial-up, they should have gone extinct long ago.īut this tech dinosaur is somehow more popular than ever, thanks to one thing: animation. The format was introduced by CompuServe back in 1987 - the digital Stone Age - to post simple graphics like stock market quotations.

#LOADING GIF LOOP TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND MP4#

Although they can’t contain any audio, they can still be as bulky as an MP4 video file because they’re not compressed. The 8-bit format means they can only display 256 colors. And not necessarily an optimal one, at that. GIFs are really nothing but a type of image file. GIF - best pronounced like the peanut butter - stands for the Graphics Interchange Format.

Loading gif loop transparent background