SWF stands for “small web format” or “Shockwave Flash” and represents an animated image extension currently part of the Adobe group of proprietary formats. Together with GIF and PNG, SWF represents one of the most widely used extensions for posting online short animations or applets than can include interactive features. Some of the main advantages of using SWF include fast loading time, supporting scalable graphics and transparencies.
The SWF format is one that you’ll find commonly used for browser games, vector animations and other types of multimedia that imply video, sound and/or user interaction. Initially developed by Macromedia, SWFs are currently Adobe Flash files and their name is an acronym for ShockWave Flash or Small Web File.
SWF files can contain a collection of images, including both vectors and bitmaps, as well as ActionScript content — a scripting language that facilitates user interaction. A SWF file can contain from few images to more than a hundred pictures with text, animation, and scripts in various combinations. For example, one page with text and several raster images inside it. Extracting all raster images by converting a SWF file to one or more image files can be a tricky operation and requires using a software program that can process multi-page image files, such as reaConverter.