04.25.08
Information about BMP, JPEG, GIF and PNG Image File Formats
There are many differences between JPEG, BMP and GIF files which many people may not know. These are the different image formats that we usually see in our computers. The BMP format is the windows default image format. It is called bitmap image. BMP images are really very large in size. Sometimes I even got files of 1GB size when I save my scanned images in BMP format. Here the image is not compressed.
For the web I prefer not to use BMP format. I feel JPEG would be a good choice. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. Technically speaking, it’s not an image format. It’s an image-compression standard. It uses a lossy compression algorithm to compress your images. Many types of software will give you an option to choose the amount of compression you wish.
GIF format was mostly used on the web. It’s great for clipart, diagrams and charts. Basically graphics that only have a small number of colors in them. So it’s better to use GIF format for those files.
PNG is the other format that is used very much these days. It stands for Portable Network Graphics. Unlike the JPG format that loses quality each time it’s saved, the PNG compression is lossLESS.
