Image file formats

• Brief overview of GIF, JPG, PNG and their suitability for web applications.  Basically, GIF's are small, do not lose image quality, can be animated, but have only 256 colors available.  JPG's are larger, do not encode all the information provided by the scanner (detail is not perfect, but file size is smaller), have virtually unlimited colors, and were meant for photographs.  They blur edges.  PNG is newer, desgined for the web, has roughly the best attributes of GIF and JPG, but is only supported on newer browsers.
• A longer tutorial on web image formats Bitmaps (BMP) were invented by Microsoft.  They do not have the compression that GIF and JPG do.  GIF was standardized in 1987 by CompuServe.  This site links to a tutorial on GIF animation, with further links to shareware for creating these.
• Side by side comparisons of GIF and JPG for a photograph.
• Differences between GIF, JPG, MPG, and Shockwave.
• Specifications for 2d file formats  Somewhat technical and somewhat old, but many formats are described.
• See a collection of PNG and JPG images at various resolutions and qualities.
• PNG  /ping/  main web site.  From that site:  "PNG was designed to be the successor to the once-popular GIF format, which became decidedly less popular right around New Year's Day 1995 when Unisys and CompuServe suddenly announced that programs implementing GIF would require royalties, because of Unisys' patent on the LZW compression method used in GIF. Since GIF had been showing its age in a number of ways even prior to that, the announcement only catalyzed the development of a new and much-improved replacement format. PNG is the result."