  JPEG JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group and has .jpg file extension. JPEG is one of the image file formats that are supported on the World Wide Web.
It is the most common image file format used today, for that matter, it is important to know a little about it. If you keep opening and saving an image JPEG file, then it will loose its quality, sharpness, and clarity, for that matter, don’t open it more than once, or you’ll have a very lousy image. JPEG images can hold up to 16.7 million colours that would be best if you have photographs or other complex images.
As I mentioned before, JPEG is a very bad compression that looses quality every time saved and restored. For that matter, you have to think about what images you would use it on. Good for photographs, bad for black and white images (Who needs 17 million colours in black and white image!). GIF GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format and has .gif file extension. It is also used plenty on the World Wide Web.
You might ask how is it different from JPEG? Well it only supports 256 colours (not good for complex images), unlike JPEG with 16 million. But images with GIF format will not loose any quality when you open it and save it. GIF is also good to be used with black and white images that do not require a lot of colours.
If you have an animation editor, you can make videos from your images (animated images). Transparency is also a function in GIF that allows you to make the background transparent so the background colours in Web pages could show through. GIF format should be used with logos, line drawings and icons. It is bad for photographs and images with long tones of shades. PNG PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics and has .png file extension. PNG images could also be found on the Web, but are not supported by all browsers (Internet Explorer 4 or Netscape 4). PNG was generally made to improve the GIF images. Although PNG does not support the animation like GIF, it build on the transparency. You could now change the amount of transparency in your images, also known as opacity. PNG images will not loose their quality by saving and restoring. PNG provides greater depth of colours on images, up to 24 bit. BMP BMP stands for Bitmap images that have .bmp file extension.
BMP is a ordinary image format mostly used on the Microsoft Windows platform. Supports up to 16.7 million colours, and uses a pixel map to show images. The image data is saved with 8 or 24 bits per pixel without any compression. Bitmap is a brilliant choice to photographers because of its outstanding photo quality.
Its downside is that it occupies a lot of disk space, and is a long time to download (that’s why you don’t see it much on websites). Bitmap images could also have an extension .dib. TIFF TIFF stands for Tag Image File Format and has .tif file extension. TIFF has been around for a long time is one of the most popular and extensively used file formats for storing bit-mapped images. TIFF is commonly used in image editing software because images could be at any resolution, and can be black and white, grayscale or color.
TIFF is more general that GIF and allows 24 bits per pixel. It supports five types of image compression, like RLE (Run length encoding), LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch), and JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group). You probably won’t use TIFF unless you intend to and you know how to use it. TIFF images cannot be set in Web pages and viewed from web browsers, but you could view them in programs like Adobe PhotoShop. TIFF images are high quality (like PDF), lossless format, not compressed, and is used to store the “master” copy of images used in photography. TIFF images are typically between 200 to 700 KB in size. 
