[X-Apps] How to make animated gifs?

[David Tinker]

On Saturday, May 10, 2003, at 08:26  AM, John B. Thoo wrote:

> how do I make an animated gif from a collection of .png files?

John

Can o' worms here. If you go to Shareware.com or Versiontracker, I'm 
sure you'll be able to find a standalone app. I remember having 
something called GifBuilder years ago, just do a search for "animated 
gif."

It begs the question, though on what you mean by "collection," and 
going from .png to .gif my not be a smart move bandwidth-wise. It 
creates dithering, which may be unpleasant, and could end up with large 
file size if the png's are complex. You may be further ahead by doing 
it in QuickTime totally and save as a self-contained movie. The other 
option is Flash or Fireworks or ImageReady if you  have Photoshop. You 
need some kind of timeline editor, which all the apps I mentioned are. 
I have them all, so I haven't checked out iPhoto. I have used iMovie to 
do slide shows, so it should be able to do any image series. Output 
would still be QT.

Animated gifs can get tricky to the uninitiated, so be sure to rtfm. 
Depending on the type of image content, there are various compression 
algorithms that get called to smooth the flow of data from frame to 
frame.

Dave Tinker
WhateverWerx Multimedia