So many people come up with so many fake rules for why it should have a hard G, but there are only two real rules for names, and, yes, GIF is a name (of a format). 1) If the named thing can't speak for itself, the people who named it dictate how the name is pronounced. 2) If it can speak for itself, it dictates. Nobody who isn't the named thing or its namer(s) gets to say how its name is pronounced regardless of what they think of the spelling.