A moving picture in GIF format, which is made up of a series of frames. When displayed, they provide an animated sequence that cycles over and over without stopping. Although popular on the Web, animated GIFs are larger than single-frame GIFs and take longer to download. Typically used for ad banners, the animation is usually confined to small areas of the image to keep the file size short. Very different than GIF and much more sophisticated, Flash is popular on the Web for instructional sequences as well as animations of all kind. Flash is an interactive format and its vector images take up much less space than GIF's bitmapped images.
An animated GIF is an image encoded in graphics interchange format (GIF), which contains a number of images or frames in a single file and is described by its own graphic control extension. The frames are presented in a specific order in order to convey animation. An animated GIF can loop endlessly or stop after a few sequences.
Animated GIF is an extension of the GIF standard, which allows animated images to be created by cramming a set of frames into a single file for sequential playback. Even with multiple images on the same file, the file size can still be made small because of the way GIF is encoded and because of a limited color palette. This means that the resulting image lacks detail and is of lower visual quality compared to other image formats.
Animated GIFs are a quick-and-easy way to present dynamic content, especially in Web pages. Their file sizes are small compared to other alternatives for creating dynamic content like Java and Flash and therefore can be downloaded by the browser easily, allowing for a faster browsing experience.