What Does Animated GIF Mean?

An animated GIF is an image encoded in graphics interchange format (GIF),which contains a number of images or frames in a single file and is described by its own graphic control extension. The frames are presented in a specific order in order to convey animation. An animated GIF can loop endlessly or stop after a few sequences.

Techopedia Explains Animated GIF

Animated GIF is an extension of the GIF standard, which allows animated images to be created by cramming a set of frames into a single file for sequential playback. Even with multiple images on the same file, the file size can still be made small because of the way GIF is encoded and because of a limited color palette. This means that the resulting image lacks detail and is of lower visual quality compared to other image formats.