What is an Animated GIF?
An animated GIF is animated image saved in the GIF image format. Animated GIFs are often used for pixel art because they are lossless and use an indexed color palette.
In the past, animated GIFs were the only reliable way of getting an animated image on webpages, leading Internet users to save all sorts of video clips from their favorite shows as animated GIFs. These animated GIFs were immense in file size because GIF wasn't made to store video. This led Imgur, which hosted many of these animated GIFs, to invent a "GIF Video" format to save bandwidth and storage costs. Nowadays, the WebM format tends to be used instead for video clips.