Types Of Image Formats And Their Significance In Web Development

Internet users hate sluggish website. So it is important that you do everything to avoid things that make them wait. Unfortunately, many developers knowingly or unknowingly end up creating slow websites. The major culprit is the inefficiently encoded images. Most developers don’t realize the importance of right selection of image formats that severely impacts page load time.

While saving images for web development the primary goal should be to preserve the quality of the images and reduce their file size so as to make them easily downloadable or transportable. Here are the most prevalent types of image formats and their role in web development:

JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Expert Group. This format has a basic use in saving photographs. The biggest advantage of JPEGs that they do not have a limited color palette. This feature allows you save all of the colors present in your images. JPEGs are the image format of modern era, hence offers huge compression for images despite of a lot of colors, leading to the smaller file size. JPEG makes a perfect choice for the development of superfast websites.

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, is mainly used for graphics. These days its uses are rare as this format is limited to 256 colors. However, it is not extinct yet because of its animation capability. Flash is though considered as a substitute of GIFs, but the smaller file size is probably another thing that has kept GIF alive. Flash files are too large for websites that often causes trouble in loading. It can be used in web development for simple computer-generated images or any other images having fewer colors. The major benefits of using GIF format is the ease of animation, ability to provide transparency and create small file size.

PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics format is a newly introduced and said to be the successor of the GIF format. Though, it is actually a hybrid of GIF and JPEG format. PNG was supposed to be the best of all the image formats but still it couldn’t satisfy few of the requirements of web developers. For instance, PNG provides greater support for transparency but lack the support for animation. Also, it has a have a better compression algorithm than GIF, but sometimes it may have a larger file size than GIF.

Each of the image formats has its own pros and cons, and it better than the other for specific purpose. Hence, the selection of image format has to be made as per the need of the web development and the type of project.