When talking about emails with dynamic content, it is interesting to make a comparison of APNG images vs. Animated gifs. The truth is that email marketing is still one of the strategies with the highest return on investment. However, for an email campaign to be effective, impacting users is key.
This is not always easy. Virtually all companies use this channel to communicate with their customers. This makes it a rather crowded channel. Users receive many emails every day. And although the opening rate is good, keep in mind that most of them end up in the trash.
Surprising subscribers is the real challenge facing email marketing today. To do this, a good option is to use dynamic or interactive content in campaigns. It is a way to add a point of originality and creativity to your emails to attract the attention of users and arouse their curiosity.
But as in the rest of the strategies, it is not a question of launching to use these contents in any way. You have to be clear about what you want to achieve and how to do it. Note that this practice also has its technical risks. Therefore, its use can be a resounding success or a resounding failure.
Be that as it may, one of the questions that must be assessed is what format of images that support animations is better to use. Therefore, knowing all the ins and outs of APNG images vs. Animated GIFS can help you decide which one best suits your goals.
The GIF format is the most widely used for animations
The acronym GIF refers to the terms Graphics Interchange Format. It is an image format that allows the succession of frames to create an animation without sound that is repeated in a loop.
GIFs have existed since 1987 and today they are the most widespread format on the world wide web. It is enough to enter any social network to find them everywhere. Even its use is very common in instant messaging applications.
Its success is due in part to the fact that it is a format that allows movement, making it more dynamic than images, and that is much lighter than video. In this way, it brings together the best of both formats.
The GIF is a format that shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon. However, today there are other alternatives to its use. Therefore, it is interesting to know the differences between APNG images vs. Animated gifs.
On the other hand, creating an animated GIF can be very simple. There are many options online where you can choose your animation or you can create your design exactly as you imagine it and then export it in GIF format.
APNG – Mozilla and its alternative to the GIF
APNG or Animated Portable Network Graphics is an extension of the PNG image format that adds the ability to play animated images in a very similar way to the GIF format.
This format was developed in 2004 by Stuart Parmenter and Vladimir Vukicevic. Although in 2007 it was rejected as a standard, Apple rescued it in 2016 and began using it to animate the stickers of its iMessage applications in iOS 10, which finally made it popular.
Today several applications offer support. For example, Firefox, Chrome and Opera already allow you to work with this format. In the same way, Photoshop brought out “apnggasm”, a plugin for creating animated PNGs which, in fact, is pretty much the only tool powerful enough to do so.
APNG images vs. Animated GIFS have important differences. However, both options allow you to create dynamic images that can add another twist to the creativity of your content.
APNG images vs. Animated gifs
In the competition between APNG images vs. Animated GIFS One thing that can be said is that the APNG is a powerful alternative to the GIF. APNG is a technically superior format. While the GIF allows an 8-bit depth limited to 256 colors, the APNG has a 24-bit color depth and can reproduce more than 16 million colors.
Obviously, the size of APNG is usually larger than GIF. And it is that higher image quality is linked to a greater file weight. However, given its quality, it can be said that weight is not a determining factor in choosing one format or another. In fact, APNG has been shown to have better compression than GIF.
Another factor that gives APNG technical superiority is its ability to support transparency. And not only total but also partial, working with layers and improving their integration in the web design. On the other hand, GIF transparencies are very simple and often create unsightly edges on images.
However, one of the advantages of GIF over APNG is that it is a format that has better support in browsers. It is supported by all of them and this makes it the most widely used format on the Internet. Although APNG is already being allowed in several browsers (in some with the help of extensions), Internet Explorer and Edge do not support this type of animated image.
In short, the advantages of Animated Portable Network Graphics over the GIF format are numerous. Your animations have better quality with more effective compression. The only reason it is not as widespread is because of the lack of support in browsers, social networks, and instant messaging applications.
