Choosing the right image format is very important when you want to add graphics to your website. Many people save their images in Window’s default format, that is, BMP. But this format creates very large picture sizes and hence is not suitable to be put up on web. It will consume the entire bandwidth of your site while the user is trying to download it.

Another thing to be remembered is that the smaller the size of the picture, the lower will be its quality.

Some of the popular image formats for web are:

GIF
Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF was invented by CompuServe in 1987. It was the very first image format used on web. GIF image can use 256 colors only. Due to this, the photographs and images stored in this format are not attractive. It is popular because the files in GIF format are very small in size. It is the only format which is capable of creating small animations.

The GIF images are used for technical images such as diagrams or images which contain limited colors.

JPEG
JPEG got its name from its designer Joint Photographic Experts Group. It is suitable for storage of photographs of a high-quality with small file sizes. It is perfectly suitable and supported by all web browsers. In fact, it is the default format for the pictures clicked with the use of a digital camera.

The only disadvantage of JPEG is that the image loses data when it is compressed. Whenever you come across an image on the web that looks distorted, it is due to the JPEG compression.

PNG
Portable Network Graphics, or PNG, is the latest image format for the web. It was designed to replace the GIF format. The PNG files use millions of colors, not just 256 colors alone. They are smaller in size. Also, data and quality is not lost in PNG compression.

A great feature of PNG is that is supports 'alpha transparency' which means that it supports transparent backgrounds that blend with an image. However, it is currently not supported by Internet Explorer.

Formats conversion
All web graphics should be in either JPEG or PNG format. Image editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop enables you to convert files from one format to another. The 'Batch Converter' program changes the format of an entire folder at once.