Thursday, March 26, 2020

GIF's and memes

A GIF, or Graphical Interchange Format, is a bitmap image format that was invented on June 15 1987 by a US software writer called Steve Wilhite for CompuServe.

Gifs are highly compressed images that typically allow up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, which in total allow up to 256 colours across the image.

For comparison, a JPEG image can display up to 16 million colours and pretty much reaches the limits of the human eye.

Back when the internet was new, gifs were used extensively because they didn’t require much bandwidth.

A single gif file can feature multiple frames which are displayed in succession in order to create an animated clip, these can either be looped endlessly or just stop at the end of the sequence.

We tend to use animated gifs today as “Reaction Gifs”, they act as fun replies for conversations on apps like Facebook Messenger.

The main difference between an animated gif and a meme is that memes tend to be static images that make a topical or pop culture reference and animated gifs are, more simply, moving images.

You can find all the animated gif memes that your heart desires at website such as Giphy and Awesome Gifs.

As with most things, gifs and memes work better together. Grab an animated gif and stick some topical words on it et voilĂ , you have an animated meme.

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