Advantages and disadvantages of gifs (P3)

Gifs primarily used as a file compression format allows images to be compressed into very small file sizes. It offers lossless file compression, but has a limited colour palette causing some areas to become gray.

Here this box art has been compressed to the point where it can only support four colours.

One other use is for animated images, this is done by placing images in a sequence to create the illusion of movement (So just like regular animation). This is very popular on internet image boards as they are self playing and do not require the use of  a video player. They are on the other hand fairly limited in their complexity due to its limited file size and colour, it can only ever render 256 colours at a time. They are also capable of transparent backgrounds.