Comments on: Practicalities of using animated gifs

By: James Sergeant

James Sergeant — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 04:20:00 +0000

any information on how much you reduced the gif file size using this method? i’m considering using simple animated gif’s in background of a web page but not if a small file size isn’t acheivable. thanks, James

By: wodejia g

wodejia g — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:58:00 +0000

I use Gimp to create animated gifs. It is easy to use.

By: bgrggfe

bgrggfe — Sat, 26 May 2012 02:00:00 +0000

Imean Shaheed was working last Sunday when federal agents rushed into the Patapsco Flea Market, announced over the loudspeaker that the bazaar was closed for business and shut down vendors selling Cheap Louis Vuitton Handbags and Tiffany & Co. jewelry."It was like the movies," the 20-year-old Shaheed said Saturday after the Cherry Hill flea market re-opened. Some booths were empty, but the parking lot was full and customers flocked to vendors such as Shaheed who were open for business via Louis Vuitton Outlet Store.

By: boagworld

boagworld — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:43:00 +0000

I didn’t want it animating all the time. That would be annoying like in the bad old days.

By: gautch

gautch — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 21:22:00 +0000

Ahh! Slick. Your “Make use of delays” was what made me miss it.

By: Richard Garside

Richard Garside — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:56:00 +0000

Gimp has a fab feature for optomizing animated gifs. It will work out exactly which elements stay the same and change between each frame and only include what it needs to.

It’s been a while since I used it, but I just checked the docs and you can find it here:

Filters -> Animation ->
Animation Optimize

By: boagworld

boagworld — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:07:00 +0000

Sure. You are looking at it ;) look carefully.

By: gautch

gautch — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:08:00 +0000

Do we get to see your end result?

By: boagworld

boagworld — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:06:00 +0000

That is superb advice. Thanks.

By: Jesús E. Lobejón

Jesús E. Lobejón — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:18:00 +0000

I will add some more tips to create/optimize Photoshop Animated GIFs:

-try to make the background solid: sacrificing it, if possible, will help the color reduction and optimization

-you can import video as an animation with the File>Import>Video Frames to Layers. Play with all the options, specially the one that takes only X frames for each second of video

-if you import video frames, use a layer mask to limit animation to some areas, and duplicate that mask to other layers, dragging it with the Option/ALT key pressed

-transparency has a role in this too, try activating/deactivating it (in the Save for Web dialog) and watch what happens with the filesize