What is the gif graphic format?

A GIF image employs lossless data compression so that the file size of an image may be reduced without degrading the visual quality, provided the image can be rendered with only 256 colours. (However, there is a hack that can overcome this limitation under certain circumstances; see true colour.) This limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for color photographs (which are more commonly seen in the JPEG format) and other images with continuous color, but well-suited for more simple images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color. Monochrome photographs can be represented well by the GIF format but still suffer from filesize bloat due to the inappropriate compression technique.