What does it mean to say that an image is a .jpg or a .gif?
You will be familiar with making images in Paint. You may have noticed that when you save your work it is given the file extension .bmp. This describes the type of image that has been created and says something about how it is stored. .bmp indicates a bit map, and is generally a fairly large file.
Image files used on web pages need to be as small as possible to enable them to load quickly. The most common formats used on the web are:
I do not intend to go into any detail here about the differences between the different formats. However, it is important if you are publishing images on your web page that they are in a format a browser can read. It may be necessary to use graphics software or a special conversion program to change an image properties from one type to another.
Images from digital cameras and scanners are normally already in gif or jpg format. Clip Art may need to be converted.