Advantages and Disadvantages of using animated GIFs

An animated GIF is a file format that allows you to use a series of separated frames and put them together in order to create a type of animation. Animated GIFs are very helpful in some ways but also have their disadvantages too.

Advantages

There are several advantages to using animated GIFs and the first is that they have relatively small file sizes; this means that they can be used easily online as they can load quicker and still have a good quality.

As well as small file sizes GIFs also support transparent backgrounds and therefore can help show a professional look to a website with an animation over a different background.

Another advantage of GIFs is that can show something in a better way than would normally be possible as they can show emotions and movement which a still image may not be able to, this might also be helpful when creating tutorial animations. This also ties in with the fact that using GIF files can entice different, younger audiences as the children may be amused by these animations.

Disadvantages

Although animated GIFs have advantages they also have their disadvantages as they only have a maximum colour palette of 256 colours so therefore can sometimes look of a poorer quality than other types of file or image. This can lead to the images having more ‘blocky’ colours and also looking slightly pixelated.

Another disadvantage of using animated GIFs is that once the animation has been coded into the actual GIF file there is no way to go back and edit the image. This may lead to having to start all over again to make a minor adjustment to an image.

Although these images have small file sizes and therefore should run smoothly online they are also dependant on internet connection and could lead to the site they are used on looking less professional.

In conclusion using animated GIFs can be very successful or very unsuccessful, it depends on how they are used. if they are used in the right way and are simple and effective they are very good and give the site a very professional look. However, if they are not used well and are spammed onto a site they make the website look very unprofessional and a poor quality.