on my website, im using jpeg images.
they are large, and slow to open on a dialup modem.
i dint realize this, i got dsl.

anyway, i was wondering what the best format for webpage pics is?
i want realativly good quality, but i want them as small as possible.

whats your preference?

.gif, .jpg, .bmp, .png, and the many more i couldnt think of.

BMP - HELL NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
JPG - for photos, they still compress better than PNGs in that area
PNG - way to go for graphics. Just be careful with transparancy if you care about usability for IE users.
GIF - only when you need some animations. There is already an MNG-format (think animated PNGs) which is better than GIF in terms of compression and colors but it's not that widely supported.

If your going for size, gif or jpg is best. For best quality I tend to use png's for that. Try to stay away from animated gifs, they are just annoying to me and jpg will have better colors than any other if your considering size a factor, which is in most cases.

My personal list of order you should consider at all instances:

1. jpg
2. png
3. gif

Any others.. well, probably are fully supported by all browsers, especialy bmp's which just totally suck arse really when it comes to displaying in a browser.

yeah, i knew bmp was large, but i wanted to at least throw it out.

I would stick with jpegs but decreasing the quality to 75% will knock a large amount of the size off and shoudln't change the images much.

yeah, but not for buttons, or graphics. PNGs are better for those. JPGs blur them and make them ugly and there most often larger.

ya it depends on the picture.
bitmaps (.bmp) are uncompressed and not really suitable for the web.

jpegs (.jpgs) are good for photos and pictures with lottsa details. (colours blending into another etc.

If the picture only has a few colours and not much detail use .gif images.

Iv forgotton exactly how each format compresses the image but if ya google for some info and you learn how each is formatted then ya can get a decent idea how each should be used. i thiink gif images store each colour in the beginning of the file and then when each couour i used say from here to here use colour #3 if that makes sense.

have fun.
Ben.

I use jpegs and pngs

I don't use gifs, fsf told me not too

jpg for photos
png everything else

why not gifs?

PPM for storage, 8bits PNGs for everything web, and with an occasional JPG touch.