What is a .GIF file?
GIF is an 8-bit (256-colour) image format best known for short looping animations.
- Did you know
- GIF was introduced by CompuServe in 1987; its looping animations later became a staple of internet culture.
- Its creator Steve Wilhite insisted the name is pronounced with a soft G, as in the peanut butter brand Jif, not with the hard G of “graphics”.
- The patent on the LZW compression GIF relied on triggered a licensing dispute in the 1990s that directly inspired the creation of the royalty-free PNG format.
- On the web a .GIF file is served with the MIME type
image/gif. - Analyser spots a .GIF file by its signature bytes
47 49 46 38- ASCII for "GIF8".
- What Analyser shows you
- View EXIF, GPS, camera settings, histograms, dominant colours, OCR text, and AI-generation markers in JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, GIF, BMP, TIFF, AVIF and JPEG XL images. Detects computational-photo wrappers (Apple Live Photo, Google and Samsung Motion Photo, Ultra HDR gain maps), opens THM movie-thumbnail files, and extracts every embedded image from multi-image files - all sizes in an ICO, both halves of an MPO stereo pair, and every page of a multi-page TIFF.
- Open a .GIF file
- Drag a .GIF file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It opens entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.