I'll just post my comment from when I ran across this on lemmy before

I’ll tell the agile fragile fugitive gin-drinking giraffes eating ginger ginseng to imagine gingerly using their digits to engineer a geological survey of the gist of your comment. They ate too much gingerbread and now have gingivitis, so the margins of those attracted to religion aren’t as rigid as the original origins of those of that region and we have to remain vigilant lest magic supersede logic, which of course would be terrible for legislation of the legions.

Did Jeorge of the gungle come by too?

.gif came first and no one uses .jif anymore because there are better options.

.jif was named to follow .gif.

Its also .jfif to be accurate, and no one really used .jif or .jfif.

And it’s pronounced ’gif’ (probably).

The P in JPEG stands for photographic so I guess we shall pronounce it "jayfeg" based on that logic.

/s

Descriptive linguistic opinion: both the hard and soft G pronunciations are used, with the hard G being more common, but I like the soft G and use it myself.

The "G" stands for "Graphics". Why would anybody pronounce it "jif"?

Well some of us are refined enough to pronounce it like “giraffe-ics.”

(But also because it was a joke by the format’s creators. “Choosy developers choose GIF.” Like the “choosy moms” Jif peanut butter commercials.)

Because the words inside an acronym have no bearing on how the acronym is pronounced. And in this case, it’s not just as acronym. It’s a product name, where the creators get to choose to name it whatever the fuck they want. “Choosy developers choose gif”. So there’s plenty of reasons it should be using a soft g and zero reasons it should be using a hard g.

Ask the person who created the format, who pronounced it that way themselves

The U in scuba stands for underwater yet people pronounce it scOOba

The E in hepa stands for efficiency yet its pronounced HEPA with a short E

The A in nato stands for Atlantic and the O stands for organization

The first A in ASAP is for as

The Os in POTUS, SCOTUS and FLOTUS all come from of and the Us comes from United

Acronyms don’t need to sound like the word they are from

the "literally means figuratively now" argument is stupid, saying it in non literal scenarios is used as hyperbole. You would never say "I'm figuratively dying of thirst"