The photo from that unforgettable vacation, the logo of the family business, the background image on your webpage, there are many types of images out there. After downloading an image from the internet, did you ever wonder why the heck is there a .jpg, .gif, or .png on the end of the file name? Well, they are all different types of images, and the computer reads them all very differently.  Here’s the low down.

First the GIF:
This guy is the most popular guy in the crowd. It is great for compressing areas of the same color and for those cutsie small animations that you see every now and then. It also can be transparent, but is not quite as high quality as other types of images.  Gif supports a maximum of 256 colors, which makes them great for almost any graphic on the web, except photographs of course.
Gifs can be used for logos, line drawings, and icons.  They don’t usually work well with JPGs or gradients.

Next the JPG:
Whenever you see this on the end of your file name it probably means the file is a fabulous photo.  It can hold many, many colors - 16.7 million to be exact.  This kind of file is usually for photographs.  However, when resizing this type of image, it throws away information.  Once this information is thrown away it can not be retrieved again. It’s like emptying your virtual trash bin.
Ever sit on a website for what seems like a century waiting for an image to load? Before you chuck your computer out the window, know it probably means the web developer is not using the cool progressive JPG feature. With this feature, images can be saved as a progressive JPG, which means it shows a low quality image on the web page at first, and then over a few automatic passes loads the higher quality image.

Finally the PNG:
This is the baby of the bunch.  Recently becoming popular, and the newest of the group it was developed to take over and surpass GIFs. PNG was designed to offer the main features of the gif format while also having a greater color depth.  Right now there is not as much support for this file type, but it is expected in the future to become more and more popular.

Presto! That is the magical world of image file types.