Thers's an idea - revise the expansion of the acronym to say Giraffics Interchange Format. Make it an ISO standard and donate proceeds of sales of the paper version to protecting the giraffes. Problem solved.

jrafics interchange format is exactly how you say it long. Why is this even a discussion?

“joint potographic experts group”

Do you pronounce "gift" with a soft 'g'?

No, but "gift" is a borrowing from Old Norse. "GIF", as far as I know, is not an Old Norse lexical item.

It's still a very common English word that's spelled very similarly. One can hardly be surprised if people guessing at the pronunciation of "GIF" select a hard 'g'.

Sure. So English has some words which start with "gi-" which have hard 'g's ('gift', 'give', 'girl', 'giggle') and some which have soft 'g's ('giant', 'giraffe', 'gibber', 'ginger'), so both pronunciations are actually reasonable in English for the orthographic form 'GIF'.

I'm glad we agree.