Whats the Best Graphic Formats For Your Needs?

Find out which graphic formats are the best for you

How many times have you sent or received bloated emails with large graphic files attached, which quickly fill your mailbox?

There are generally 5 popular image formats theses are GIF, BMP, JPG, TIFF & PNG

GIF Graphics Interchange Format
The GIF format is ideal to create small images due to lossless data compression, It can convert uncompressed images to 10% of their original size, but this depends on the on the composition and repetitive elements of the original image.

One of the downsides of GIF is the limitation of only supporting up to 256 colours, but this means it’s generally an ideal format for thumbnails or other low colour images such as web pages.

JPG Joint Photographic Experts Group
JPG pronounced jpeg is best suited to photos or other real scene images; it’s one of the most common images around, it offers a variable compression called lossy which means visual quality is lost in the process, but the amount can be selected, lowering the quality reduces image byte size and thus increasing quality increases byte size which is a nice feature giving us the ability to get a balance of both. Many digital cameras take images in JPG format

BMP Bitmap

Usually called bitmap the BMP file format is very common with windows. BMP files in themselves are uncompressed meaning the file sizes can be significantly more than many other formats.

Another downside to bitmaps is due to the very way they are made of tiny squares; this means that as an image is enlarged the squares also become larger and give images a blocky look.

As BMP images store a lot of redundant information using a compression application such as ZIP will offer very good compression.

TIFF Tagged Image File Format
The TIFF image format was one very popular until PNG arrived, it’s one of the very few formats that can actually store multiple images, on the downside though as there are so many variations of TIFF it can be difficult to find an application to open them.

PNG Portable Network Graphics
PNG which is the newest of the bunch could be considered a 24 bit version of the GIF format, it was actually supposed to replace the GIF format; as such it employs the same lossless data compression making it a good choice for most types of graphics.

So if you looking for a good all round file format that’s going to be around for a while then checkout PNG, it’s supported by all good graphics applications.

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