Why do gifs take up so much storage space?

Question

Why do gifs take up so much storage space?

In: 20

Answer 1

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.