The graphic formats

Photos and drawings can be saved in many formats. The most common are:

JPG (.JPG or .JPEG extension)

JPEG is the most used for photographic images.
JPEG can use up to 16.7 million colors.
It is a "lossy compression" format: this means that JPEG reduces both file size and picture quality.

GIF (.GIF extension)

GIF is a "lossless compressed" image format that can use 256 colors.
GIF files have a compact size and good quality.
This format is used for images that have small size and few colors, as icons, banners, logos.

PNG (.PNG extension)

PNG is a general purpose "compressed" and "lossless" format (as GIF) that can use 16.7 million color (as JPEG).
It can be used as well for photo, icons and logos.

BMP (.BMP extension)

BMP ("bitmap") files can render an image with 2, 16, 256, 65536, or 16.7 million colors.
The bitmap format is not compressed: it doesn't reduce the image quality, but makes the file size larger.

The image tag

To display a drawing or a photo, use the image tag. This tag states at least:

1. the file path (the address of the folder where is the image) and the name of the image:
2. the short description of the image (usually one word or two).

It looks, for example, this way:

<IMG SRC="images/balloons.jpg" ALT="Coloured balloons">

Resize the image

You can resize the image, specifying another width or another height.

If you specify a different width and height at the same time, verify that their proportion is the same;
otherwise, the image will twist.

<IMG SRC="images/balloons.jpg" WIDTH="100" ALT="Four balloons">
<IMG SRC="images/balloons.jpg" HEIGHT="50" ALT="Four little balloons">
<IMG SRC="images/balloons.jpg" WIDTH="150" HEIGHT="50" ALT="Oops!">