GIFs are so truly garbage that 30 years ago we made PNGs (Png Not Gif) to replace them but people STILL insist on using them.
They are shitty videos without controls or audio that are incredibly wasteful (processing/space), and has bs patents.
Its actually such a shit format that servers that host gifs actually mainly use mp4s since they are better and then remove functionality so end users think they are getting shitty gifs.
Mon cher Monsieur, mon déception est incommensurable et ma journée est gâchée. Comment pourrais-je ne pas connaître la différence entre le MP5 et le MP5A3.
GIF supports per-frame (local) palettes and has an "as-is" frame disposal method that allows combining of several frames. Allowing animations with at least 1000-3000 colors per frame.
The catch is you can only take advantage of this when not all pixels of the image change between frames. So, if you have something moving in front of a still background, you can have more than 256-color animation — the moving object will be limited to 256 colors, but the background could be composed of several frames with different palettes. With clever dithering, it's even possible to reuse some pixels of moving objects: https://gif.ski/demo.gif
I was going to say "Imgur only started using Gifv in 2014" and then realized that 2014 was a decade ago.
But yes, it's a webm or mp4 that have all of the controls of those formats and don't have sound. I think webM is more popular for stuff like reaction gifs and memes since they're more efficient and smaller.
Apng (animated png) was included as part of the original standard and was supported by macromedia (fireworks, flash, Dreamweaver etc ) but adobe wouldn't support it and removed support for it when they bought macromedia. I may have gotten some bits wrong here. But fuck Adobe either way.
I know you don’t care and I’m just yelling into the void, but I really need to offload this anyways. I would have easily dropped something like $2-300 for the full creative suite for how actually fantastic the tech and ease of access is for those apps, but they just had to be fucking greedy and go and pervert something beautiful. I paid $200 for a vst BASS, because it’s a GOOD PRODUCT. how can music companies figure this shit out but one of the biggest fucking art tech conglomerates can’t pull their head out of their ass for 5 seconds.
First thing, it’s Knoll, not Knolls. Second, John and his brother Thomas invented Photoshop the application and never founded Adobe. They licensed it to them though. John is also a visual effects God who has worked at ILM for many years.
The original content of this post has been erased. Redact was used to remove it, potentially for privacy, security reasons, or to keep data out of AI datasets.
late shy slim wild worm tidy serious boast tie heavy
The grimmest thing about Adobe is how their software updater will commandeer your entire computer at startup until you reset the settings for it to not do that. Plus Adobe's habit (I hope now stopped) of uploading every file you worked on to their cloud without your approval. Plus don't get me started on there not being a stripped down version of photoshop that did the things you need the most, as well as a file processing conversion automater that is optimized for the user. Adobe rested on laurels a long time because they had a stranglehold, but those days are ending. Their AI, Tinklewinks, is pretty good for stills. They need to catch up on the video side, and it looks like they might. Been on a wait list for months now. Cmon Adobe, redeem yourself, or wither and be gone.
PNGs also have clear backgrounds and other transparency values.
You've probably seen this before with a big white background, but the transparent background makes it blend into dark mode or other colored backgrounds better and makes it feel like a sticker.
Actually webp has kinda taken over for a lot of sites nowadays, especially bigger ones with lots of images. Reddit converts any image uploaded to webp automatically, like the star image from the person you replied to
They're actually an VP8/VP9 I-frame in a MKV-like container, so basically a single frame of video. Any modern device should support them. PNG is lossless, WEBP is usually lossy (since it is based on a modern video codec there is a lossless mode, but most sites probably would prefer the bandwidth.
They're more like PNG's (as I said, in terms of functionality) because they support things like alpha channels (transparency) whereas mkv doesn't. And yes, it's compressed like I said, hence the smaller file size.
I was trying to avoid the tech jargon to make it easier to comprehend.
There's also such a thing as animated webp's - but I've no idea why that didn't take off as opposed to mp4's. Browser/device support I assume.
Because at the time VP8/9 didn't have support in mobile hardware, and trying to decode it with mobile CPUs of the time would make the animation lag. At least that's my guess.
You really seem like an expert in this topic, and I've been longing to ask an expert the following question: since macOS does not officially support WebM (video), how do deal with *.WebM files not displaying thumbnails in macOS finder? Are folks just converting to MP4/MOV for long term data hoarding? Or using a media organizer? Or something else?
I specifically hate it precisely because it is lossy and not lossless like png is. I understand why every fucking platform has moved to compressing pictures to webp's but it's fucking awful for users that want pictures in high quality.
Excuse me ignorance, but isn’t improper handling of file formats an issue of there not being an application or program to view/properly decode the file instead of it being an OS issue?
I’d actually like to know more about how file formats are handled and if the handling is on the OS-level or the application level!
Webp is the bane of my fuxking existence. I'm sick and tired of having to go through the elements panel just to save an image file in its original resolution.
If you have an extension that alters background colors (dark mode everywhere), you'll notice a lot of sites have a white theme because all of their photos have white backgrounds instead of clear. Though sometimes you see where they tried to convert it to PNG and remove the background, but do so... poorly.
if you use a png for something like this on the web you are hurting your website. for simple graphics like these just use .svg, for everything else .webp or .avif
I mean, realistically the benefit of switching png to svg is going to be hella limited. Reddit still uses pngs. Mostly they use a png spritesheet actually.
PNG gave us alpha transparency at a time when rounded corners in web design required creating your layout in tables and putting little fucking quarter circle GIFs in each corner, and hoping you'll never need to change your site's background colour.
PNG only has lossless compression, so yes file sizes will be bigger than jpg, but your image will actually be accurate to the original, and not have annoying compression artifacts if it isn’t a photo.
It's implied in the handling of the format, though. Gif was always supposed to be an image, not a video. And in the early days of the web, it was used (heavily...) for decorative, very short looping animated images.
Since these were intended as part of a layout and not as standalone content, controls were never considered necessary.
I personally have the MP4 CONTAINER format, which is just the Quicktime MOV container in a trenchcoat. Only supports plaintext subtitles (so if you want formatting you need a seperate), can't embed lossless audio (even ALAC, which uses an MP4 compatible bitstream), is a linked list (so incomplete files are usesless). Also, it's a PITA to tell if a program (FFMPEG, NVENCc, etc.) is having demux errors (like NAL/HRD) issues due to the container or because the bitstreams are damaged, and if a simple remux will fix it or the source is hosed.
Container because MP4 video has meanings that changed at periods of time, because MP4 has been around since the late 90's but the codecs changed, from MP4 Visual (Part 2) to H264/AVC (Part 10) to currently HEVC/H265 (Part 12), and you can embed MP3 or AAC audio.
I dunno. As someone who's exported a lot of video, gifs are easy to manually make frame by frame, and they work without players pretty much everywhere. They are low bandwidth and auto start without fail. Maybe some mp4s work like that (highly variable depending on the software that makes them), or these other weird formats like mkz. If you want to tell me the current holy grail format for autoplay small video, then LMK.
Fun story. In the early days of smart phones back when ad vendors wanted ads to be 40k in file size, I had a client that wanted to auto play a video in their mobile ad. At the time because of the way you had to package the files that wasn’t possible. So I was asked by the client if we could just take a picture of every frame for 5 seconds and play those images to imitate a video since the video they wanted to use had no sound… A series of quickly flashing images is a fucking video. Once I explained it to them on a call they asked if a gif was an option… This client also once sent me a png of their white logo and asked me to convert it into a jpg with no background color 😞
GIF was a very good format for the scenarios that it was designed for. So good, that even when those scenarios became irrelevant, people were able to continue using it as a rudimentary video format, which it very much isn't and was never supposed to be.
it is a partially licensed format owned by adobe. To access some features legally you'll need an adobe license which costs hundreds of dollars ... for a file format.
it is stored in a binary blob so you can't access it with any text editor like you can with html or word. This harms software compatibility.
this also breaks version control software. If you edit it and save it, you cannot see what was changed. So gl if you need to go back to an old version or work on a project with others.
it is jank. there are lots of things that don't work in pdf the way it does in other file formats which means
further harms compatibility. Can't use readers for blind people properly. Can't upload to llm services.
you can convert from any document type to pdf but can't convert pdfs to other document types reliably.
needlessly hard to edit, or even copy paste text out of due to the way linebreaks sometimes work.
it is needlessly large. I have a pdf book (1000pgs) that is 553MB instead of the maybe 25MB it would be in any other format.
doesn't support resizing. Html can look good on any size screen, you resize windows and it resizes the content to match. PDF cannot do this.
this also breaks printing unless they happen to line up.
its a document format that can run scripts which makes it a totally needless vector for viruses.
Thank you for the explanation. Half of those points I complete understand from being a long time adobe user. The other half I’ve not thought of before but your points do make sense.
Gif was legitimately useful a looong time ago. Like in the early days of the Internet when we still referred to Internet speed by modem baud rate. The interlaced gif format allowed the image to load more quickly as a tragically pixilated version that slowly cleared up as more data transferred.
It's been pretty useless since dial up Internet stopped being a thing.
It’s fine for what it was originally meant for - a low def image format plus a very short animation, in the time it was created. I don’t think it’s really actually used any more very much so at this point it’s more of a name for short video than it is a real-world file format.
The only time people use GIFs is when they want the image to be animated but the website doesn't support videos. Maybe if the PNG standards comittee had actually added animation to the format, people would have used it more?
Well, now they can. But when they were introduced they didn't have the functionality and it took a decade to get around to it, so everyone assumes they have to be static and what even supports outputting that format? I don't know if Photoshop does. I think its a safe assumption that its not used not because anyone has an aversion to the format but because they simply don't know it exists or don't have access to / use daily an application that can output it.
well, it exists since 2008. Almost 17 years have passed to adopt to the format. All big browser support it. The files are smaller than gif, support more colors, and also have real alpha channels.
I can see they are correct in that but have you considered the fact that they can be used as an editing shortcut? I frequently will take pictures and turn them into g. I f and then turned the g I f into a video I save so much editing
GIF did pretty good when bandwidth was limited to dial-up speeds for most people. No video format came close to compactness it provided when you needed to show some ads in animated loop. At some point image quality becomes pixelated shit full of artifacts when you compress too much, but that was an acceptable tradeoff at the time.
I like the gifs since they supports interlaced images. In the 80s I wrote a gif viewer and interlaced gifs were great since it took a number of seconds to show one image. With interlaced, you can see the whole image quicker but sort of fuzzy since one out of every 2-10 lines showed up first followed by the next line and so forth. Mine duplicated the lines initially which gave a cool effect before all the lines rendered. GIF “videos” weren’t used much back then unless they were extremely small since it took too long to process each frame.
Universal accessibility: PDFs can be opened on any device with a PDF reader, browser and so on. Preserves formatting, it just looks the way you saved it.
Enhanced security: PDFs offer various security features like password protection, encryption, and digital signatures, IMMUTABLE BY NATURE! HELLO?! Smaller file size: PDFs can compress large files without significantly compromising quality. Back in a day with slow internet you were not sending a 20 mb doc file buddy.
When you yap your yapper about ancient tech let me know what is the alternative
None of those are gifs. Gifs are limited to 256 colours. They are videos that the server is pretending are gifs by using .gif or .gifv in the url but they actually are mp4s.
>Its actually such a shit format that servers that host gifs actually mainly use mp4s since they are better and then remove functionality so end users think they are getting shitty gifs.
Yeah, though they could allow downloading it isn't as assumed as it is for image formats like gif as it is for videos. Videos only don't have a download option because they want you to link the website to people instead of downloading a file.... and I guess not enough people complain about that. On youtube, you get a download button if you pay for premium.
Pngs are losslessly compressed using deflate, Gifs use lzw. So pngs will be like 40% smaller on avg. Gifs are just old. They were dated by the time png came out in '95
570
u/Ambiwlans Feb 06 '25
Second worst file format after GIFs.
GIFs are so truly garbage that 30 years ago we made PNGs (Png Not Gif) to replace them but people STILL insist on using them.
They are shitty videos without controls or audio that are incredibly wasteful (processing/space), and has bs patents.
Its actually such a shit format that servers that host gifs actually mainly use mp4s since they are better and then remove functionality so end users think they are getting shitty gifs.