Google doesn't support animated GIF images

I've been using Blogger's blogging platform since 5 years. But I never realized that Blogger itself doesn't supports  animated GIF image files. I never needed to use animated GIF images in my blog.



In fact, Blogger is one of the service provided by Google who also owns Picasa the biggest web album. As far as I am concerned Picasa supports GIF animated images neither. You may be surprised to know that Google doesn't supports any GIF animated images in their services. May it be Picasa, Blogger or Google image search itself.



So, Why Google doesn't supports animated GIF images?

The answer is so simple, becauseGoogle doesn't want it. As the matter of fact, the  primary use of Picasa is photography, and the organization of photos. And animated GIFs aren't really part of that. We cannot say that Google mistakenly forgot to add this feature because, Google has a huge developers team who plans and do several homeworks to implement a single function.



Technically talking, animated GIF images require quite a bit of processing. There are multiple multiple color pallets, multiple draw rules, transparency, positioning of individual cells, differing timing between each cell, etc. This means that, the server will need much more processing power than opening 1 MB image file.



Many people are requesting in Google forums to enable animated GIF images in Picasa Web Album. But I don't think Google will add this feature so soon. Because, one of the important part of computing is to choose the appropriate tool for each task. There are programs out there that are specifically designed (and made) for specific purpose. We have Word processor to edit documents and we have Graphics editor like Photoshop to edit images.



Before complaining this inability of Picasa one must recall what Picasa says in their homepage, Share photos with friends and family.



Google has always been specific. They purchased YouTube for video portal. We can't expect audio or images sharing in YouTube. Same goes with Google search, we have separate section to search images, books, places and web. Same case is for Blogger, clearly a blogging environment provided by blogger. We can also talk about Adsense program which is completely advertising program. Google docs, Gmail, Feedburner, Google earth, Google waves, Google sites, and so on.



However, we cannot claim that Google doesn't support animated GIFs because they don't use it. In fact, the area that GIF covers might be very small in comparison to other photo images.



Today web designers don't want to put dancing GIF images in their web design. Instead, they uses JavaScript or flash based animation in their design. One of the drawback of GIF is it is not interactive and it is clearly a frame by frame image loading animation which might not be practical for heavy files. Though there can be other several reasons behind this.



If you seriously thinking about to put animated GIF imges in your website, then I suggest you better not to add it. Forget about GIF animation, however if you serioully need GIF animation then look for any image host that supports animated  GIF images. However you can have animated GIF ads rather than web page designed by animated GIF.



In fact, it's up to you how you use animated GIF. Proper use of animated GIF may even make your web page  much more beautiful. Animated GIF can be very helpful for tutorial websites where image might be needed to define the situation.



Before ending this article let me know you that Portable Network Graphics (PNG) was created for the replacement of GIFs.



Update: I found Google using animated image here.