According to its creator, how should GIF be pronounced?

According to GIF’s creator, Steve Wilhite, GIF should be pronounced “Jif,” with a soft G. Wilhite led the CompuServe engineering team that developed the format, and the intended pronunciation was included in the format’s early documentation. The wording “choosy programmers choose JIF” deliberately echoed the advertising slogan for the Jif peanut-butter brand.

The pronunciation debate continues because GIF is an acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, and many speakers naturally use a hard G, as in “graphics.” Both pronunciations are widely heard, and dictionaries commonly record both, so everyday usage has never fully settled the argument.

For a question specifically asking how the creator intended the name to be pronounced, however, “Jif” is the canonical answer. The distinction concerns pronunciation only: the file format itself remains the same whether someone says “Jif” or “Giff.”