Day 5: World’s Longest GIF Image

GIF images.

What are they exactly?

If you want to get all “technical”, here’s a little bit of something that Wikipedia has to say about these little buggers.

The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a bitmapimage format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.

The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel thus allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colors. The colors are chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. It also supportsanimations and allows a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame. The color limitation makes the GIF format unsuitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.

GIF images are compressed using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality. This compression technique was patented in 1985. Controversy over the licensing agreement between the patent holder, Unisys, and CompuServe in 1994 spurred the development of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) standard; since then all the relevant patents have expired.

 

But, for those who would rather not get technical about it.  GIFs are known mostly as just moving pictures or animated images.  There are applications out there that you can use to make one like Photoshop.  Of course, there are also those freewares that you can use to convert a movie clip into a GIF…but, that’s mostly for those who are a fan of something.

I came across this image when I was browsing the web.  It’s the longest Japan-made GIF that is not taken from any movie, anime, or whatnot.  I believe this GIF is an original made from scratch with whatever application the person who made this used.  It’s just a small image but, boy, does it tell a story.  It’s like you just read a short one-shot–a short, hilarious one-shot.

Anyways, here’s the aforementioned image:

So, what do you guys think?  Pretty cool, right?  Makes me want to go and try making another GIF again (made one before for a Percy Jackson fanart). XD

Well, that’s that.

Until the next post, dream on; fly on!