VisibleGif - Why Improve Images?
Your web site is your shop window
The images on your web site sell you, your capabilities and your products. Images are a major influence on how quickly your web site appears in your visitors' web browsers. Image design and image implementation impact how you are perceived. Most of the images used in constructing your web site will be implemented in GIF format.
VisibleGif can provide you with the best implementation for your GIF images.
Use the best implementation
The GIF image format is very popular on the Internet for storing images. This image format is used in buttons, in icons, in banner advertising and in layout elements. The format allows an image to be stored very efficiently. Unfortunately the format also allows an image to be stored very inefficiently.
The implementation quality of GIF image format processing software varies widely. It is far easier to find inefficient examples of GIF images than it is to find those GIF images implemented efficiently. A small single colour rectangular button inefficiently implemented can be over 2000 bytes. The costs of inefficiency when measured in unnecessary wait times for accessing web pages is enormous.
Improving an Image
Images can be improved by applying a number of rules. Rules do change over time in particular as new versions of web browser software becomes available.
VisibleGif allows you to decide which rules to apply and when.
A first approach
The first approach is to decide whether an image is required. This is a design issue.
Some images which are rectangular blocks of colour can be replaced by HTML or Cascade Style Sheets constructs. These constructs can provide background colours allowing the GIF image to be smaller than would otherwise be the case. The smaller GIF image would have its internal "background" colour set to be transparent.
Size reduction
GIF images can be made more efficient by reducing their size. This allows faster transmission over the Internet. This allows storage in a smaller amount of cache in memory or in disks.
- Comment blocks can be removed. These are never displayed.
- Colour table entries which are not used can be removed.
- A new global colour table can replace a global colour table and multiple local colour tables.
Brand enforcement
A Brand is expensive to establish and to maintain. Brand recognition relies on the relationships between design elements and in particular the proportions of the design elements. A television advert, a poster and a web page should all reinforce the brand.
GIF Images can be sized to scale for use in web pages where there is a requirement to retain proportions across a number of display sizes.
Accessible
GIF images can be made as widely accessible as possible. GIF images can be verified as using only the 16 safe colours or the 216 safe colours.
Simple Animations
New GIF animations can be produced or existing ones can be split into their component images and be resequenced.
Ease of use
A simple text editor can be used to amend or duplicate an image. The GIF image is converted to and from an XMLformatted text file. The XML tags and tag contents can be directly edited. No knowledge of XML is required.
Accountable
Processes can be applied fully under the control of the person running the VisibleGif program.
Advanced applications
Additional information can be inserted into GIF images. This does not affect the quality of the rendered image. This does not impact any GIF image processing. The additional imformation can be used independently by other applications such as security related applications.
The competition
VisibleGif provides complete visibility and accessibility to the GIF file format. It gives to the user choice over which improvements should be made. The program can be executed on a local machine. It does not need access to the Internet.
Most image editing software can create and amend GIF images. Third party GIF improvement software is available which address some of the objectives of this program. Most of these programs work behind the scenes applying rules which are outside the control of the individual running these programs.