Overview

image/gif is the media type for GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) images. A lossless format with up to a 256-color palette, it supports short animations (looping clips) and has long been used for memes and short repeating visuals.

Details

GIF uses LZW lossless compression, is limited to 256 colors, and supports only binary (on/off) transparency, so partial transparency is impossible. Its long popularity came from packing multiple frames into one file to make looping animations. However, due to the color limit and inefficient compression, an animated GIF is far larger than a short video of the same length.

From a modern web-performance view, replacing animated GIFs with muted autoplay-loop video (MP4/WebM) or animated WebP is strongly recommended; a multi-MB GIF often shrinks to a few hundred KB of MP4. For still images, PNG is better for simple ≤256-color graphics and JPEG for photographs.

Syntax

e.g. Content-Type: image/gif

File extensions

Notes

• Animated GIF is very inefficient — replace it with muted autoplay <video> (MP4/WebM) or animated WebP for performance.
• Partial transparency (alpha gradients) is impossible and colors are capped at 256; use PNG/WebP when you need translucency or rich color.
• Already compressed, so transport gzip provides no benefit.

Related types

Related headers