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Fanlore:Featured Article Archives/2020: Week 19
An animated gif (or simply "gif") is a sequence of images stored in a single graphics file in GIF format. When the graphic is displayed on a monitor screen, the sequence of images is run consecutively at speed, giving the impression of movement. The method is essentially the same as that used in movies or TV; but the clip usually quickly loops back to the start, resulting in a short sequence that keeps repeating itself.
Once upon a time, still images on the Web were often stored as gif files. However, nowadays still images are most often stored in JPEG or PNG format, so the term "gif" is commonly understood to refer exclusively to animations.
Fannish gif usage dates back to the 1990s and the days of Geocities fansites; in the mid-2000s, gifs were popular as icons in journal fandom, before achieving a new prominence as a form of fanwork and fannish interaction with media in the 2010s with the rise of Tumblr.
Gifs are typically created by taking a short section of a video and animating it into a gif, adding animated effects to an otherwise still image, or by stringing a sequence of images together to make an animation. Gifs typically use or adapt an existing image or video (e.g. a photo of a celebrity or a section of film footage) but can also be fan-created "original" (i.e. non-repurposed) animations or animated from fanart.