Pictures and your website

Picture Formats When creating a web page you will definitely need pictures . The saying a picture is worth a thousand words is true but pictures have to be handled with care as they sometimes are bulky and hence might make the site load slower. One has to ensure that all the information that is on the picture can be accessed by text as not all users can see pictures. There are a number of file formats. The most commonly used ones are GIF, JPEG and PNG . Images can be grouped into two major groups bitmaps which are pixel based and vectors which have mathematical definitions. When preparing your images fro your website one has to ensure that you compress them but at the same time ensure that the quality is not compromised. Image compression comes in two one. Loss less and lossy . GIF is an 8 bit per pixel image format. There is no quality loss with GIF compression. GIF images are more suited for cartoon like images with 256 colors or less from the 24 RGB color space. JPEG a common method of compression for photographic images. With JPEG  it is a lossy compression meaning some visual quality is lost in the process. JPEG is more ideal for images such as scanned pictures or pictures that require more that 256 colors. PNG is an extensible file format for the loss less ,portable well compressed raster images. PNG is the better of the three but some older browsers do not support it.