Hello. Not sure if this should go here or in the software forum but whatever. I've been making these really neat images in GIMP for my website and saving them as .png's. They look perfect through Mozilla and other Linux browsers. Today I went to my friends house to see how things looked through Internet Explorer and surprise, surprise, IE doesn't support png's. The image I created was transparent and since IE doesn't support png's it showed a big white block instead. Yuckkkk! So I did some googling and it said to just save them as gifs. I also found a post that said to use the "convert" tool and that made it look really bad. So I made new images and saved them as gifs but now they look really crappy. Argggg...why can't I just get the image that I made displayed on the website.

I know I should leave it as a png to take a stand against M$ but all my friends and family use IE. What file extension can I save these images as without loosing the original image? I see a lot of images created with the GIMP saved as gifs for web pages(e.g. www.gimp-savvy.com)

Why did my image change when I saved it as a gif? Is there a secret I don't know about?

jpeg? (joint picture expert group)

1) GIFs suck, use JPEGs.
2) IE sucks (even for windows users -- it's a terrible security hole
and your friends and family should be using something safer, like
Netscape or Mozilla.
3) (Slightly more helpful answer?) How do your GIFs look crappy?
did they lose colors? did they compress badly? are they no longer
transparent?

jpgs can't handle transparency. I'm trying to create circular icons that are transparent but GIMP says jpg can't handle transparency.

There is a trick to make IE support transparent PNGs like Mozilla does.

Look it up on google, just search for internet explorer png transparency.

Basically you add some proprietary IE CSS voodoo to the site, and it works. Really really stupid, but that's what I do.