Steve Wilhite told the New York Times that he was "annoyed" there was still a debate over how to say the acronym. He added that the Oxford English Dictionary was wrong to say it could be pronounced both ways.
The OED told the BBC that it was beyond the software engineer's control to determine how the word should be said.
The difference of opinion coincided with Mr Wilhite being awarded a lifetime achievement prize at The Webby Awards. To mark the moment, screens at the ceremony displayed a message he had written saying: "It's pronounced 'Jif'".
The retired US-based software writer developed the Graphics Interchange Format in 1987 while working at the internet service provider Compuserve.
The data compression technique he used allowed images to be sent over what were then slow dial-up connections at much faster speeds than had been previously possible. His efforts paved the way for his employer to start offering its customers the ability to download colour pictures rather than being limited to black-and-white.
Although the Jpeg format later caught on because it is better at compressing photographs, Gif's technique remains superior at tackling images containing large areas of uniform colour when no more than 256 different colours are used in the whole picture.
Source: BBC News
