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GIF's or JPEG's?
Below we put up a couple examples of the GIF and JPEG file format for you to get a better understanding of how images are saved for the Web, and why. The first thing to remember is the smaller the image size the faster your pages will load. Just keep that in mind at all times, and you will be on the right track.

GIF: Graphics Interchange Format.
Can be used for all images under 24BIT. Use the .gif format when your image has a few colors or is cartoon like.

JPEG: Joint Photographic Experts Group Format.
Should be used for images over 24BIT. Use the .jpg format when your image has a lot of colors or is photo like.

To make your Web pages quick to download, make sure you save your images in the right format. Save in JPEG format (.jpg) only those images that contain lots of colors and shading. Black-and-white or gray-scale pictures and pictures with large areas of a few colors should be saved as GIF files (my favorite, because of the animation capability).

GIF compresses images by saving in shorthand format large areas of a single color. So if your image has just a few areas of basic colors, it will be much smaller in GIF than in JPEG format.

First Example: Pay close attention to size instead of quality for these 2 examples.
1. Below is a image saved as a JPEG (10,127 bytes).
CD image saved as a jpg

2.This image was saved as a GIF in 64 colors (24,285 bytes).
CD image at 64 colors.

Second Example:
1.This image was saved as a GIF (2,077 bytes).
Amazon.com saved as a GIF.

2.This image was saved as a JPEG (8,678 bytes).
amazon.com saved as a JPEG.

OK, now which one of the pictures above would you use on your Web Site? I hope you choose the top ones from both sets. Can you see the difference it makes now?

Good, these examples are for size more then anything. We saved these images with Adobe Photoshop4.0, but there are plenty of other image compression programs available on the Web to get your pictures even smaller.

Free Online Tool
You can optimize your images (make the file size smaller) using our FREE online tool, the Image Optimizer.

For more examples on image size go to the "Image Size" page.

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