A novel adaptive steganographic scheme for graphics interchange format (GIF) ani mated images is proposed.Image pixels are classified as data embeddable and nonembeddable ones by the adaptive rule of int er frames,which is built by color-luminance variance in the same position and color-luminance average,and the adaptive rule of intra frames,which is built by color-order and color-map.Secret information is embed ded into certain frames of the iamge.Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve a good bala nce between stego-image quality and data-embedding capacity.Compared with other steganographic schemes, the proposed one has a high security,which guarantees unauthorized persons to extract the secret information extremely difficultly.