Why do gifs take up so much storage space?
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It’s an image for each frame. If you have a GIF animation at 30fps that’s 5 seconds long that’s 150 unique images that are stored in the file.
So most image file formats have what’s called compression, where we try to reduce their file size using various math tricks. GIF contains what’s called lossless compression, meaning it stores the image exactly as is. This is compared to jpegs, which are lossy compression, this means it slightly tweaks the image to be a little different, but this comes at huge cost savings. So this is why jpegs are smaller than gifs.
If we compare it to something it should be compared to a PNG, which is lossless as well. However GIF uses a standard data compression algorithm while PNG uses one designed specifically for images. PNG’s algorithm makes some assumptions like pixels close together will usually be similar in order to better compress, GIF doesn’t.
GIF is also arguably not entirely lossless, each gif can only contain 256 different colors, this is a hard limit and why the colors on gifs usually look bad.
GIFs can also “play video.” This also makes their file size bigger, as each frame of the video is basically a new image.
Without going into details:
Most modern photo and video formats use “compression” to keep their filesizes small.
GIF is a 36 year old format, so the compression it uses is pretty primitive and inefficient. And it *needed* to be, for GIF files to be readable on the computers of that era.
GIF was mostly used for small simple graphics in its era, and animations that consisted of only 10-30 small pictures. It did that well enough. It was never intended for video clips.
Animation isn’t a moving picture. It actually hundreds of pictures that are slightly different to simulate motion placed as a “Frame”.
When you hear the term FPS or Frames Per Seconds in animation thats how many frames are in ONE SECOND of a animation. Bambi was made at 24 Frames Per Second to make the movie. Bambi is one hour and ten minutes long. That is 1,440 individual pictures in one minute and its 86,400 pictures for the hour.
This is ALSO the case for live action gifs and live action movies. Instead of drawing, the recording device is taking pictures in rapid succession and stringing them together on a film or hardrive to simulate movement and thus Video.
The reason is simple to imagine. A Gif ain’t the size of one picture because its dozen or even thousand of pictures all being shown to you in a line… faster then your eye can track the frames (pictures) changing. (the sweet spot is like 16 FPS??? when the eye can’t register the individual pictures).
It literally an illusion. This illusion is the biological meta mechanic on how most modern entertainment is based upon. This includes Video Games as well! Isn’t it weird? Comics are just a REALLY SLOW form of animation!
“Everything? It all just pictures? Always has been.” *ACTION*
GIF is picture compression format. So a video as a GIF is a slideshow of independent images.
A real video compression format understands that the sequence of images is related, ie in most cases the next image will be near identical to the previous one. So it will save space by instead of having a load of independent images it’ll tell you how to modify the previous image to get the next frame in the video.
GIF is an old format meant for the early days of the web, and so it’s not that great at compressing images to a smaller size while keeping the quality. It can either compress them small at a very poor quality, or it can keep a decent quality but have a large size. Modern compression algorithms are much better and can produce smaller sizes at higher quality than what we had back when GIF was invented.
Will add GIF was not originally explicitly intended as an animation format. However it did allow for multiple images in a single file, so naturally animation was a fairly obvious application.
Most animation formats only log changes between frames, which saves a decent amount of space for 1980s computer animations.
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