Combine 50 .gifs into an animated .gif

Rius

I have 50 or so .gif images showing the progress of a BSG game that I'd like to turn into an animated gif. I have GIMP but I can't seem to figure out what to do. I thought I could "open as layers" them all into a single image and then save it as an animated gif, but after it opens 3 or 4 it starts opening the rest in different color palettes.

Anyone have any advice, please? Thanks in advance!

corky842

Open the first one with GIMP, set the color to RGB instead of indexed, then add the rest as layers. When that's done, set it back to indexed.

Rius

Can you elaborate a bit? I'm pretty new to GIMP and image editing in general and I'm not sure what you're talking about.

corky842

Open the first with GIMP, then:
Image -> Mode -> RGB

Then save it:
File -> Save as... -> imagename.xcf
XCF is the GIMP's native file format, so you won't lose any data or anything if the program or your computer crashes. Not likely, but just a precaution.

Then add them as new layers (copy the image, paste it into the new image, Ctrl+Shift+N to make the pasted stuff a new layer). The bottom layer is the first frame.

Save it after you add every few layers (Ctrl+S) and after you finish adding layers.

When you have them all in order:
Image -> Mode -> Indexed... -> Generate optimum palette
Then save it as a GIF.

Rius

Thanks very much, man.

corky842

You're welcome. It turned out nice. (This one, in case anyone else was curious.)

Infidel

I optimized and rehosted it, it's only 90kb now. :^:

Rius

Thanks, man =)

I imagine that had something to do with eliminating everything from each frame that doesn't change? The 51 individual .gif files are 22-25kb each, which came out to the original 1.1mb for the animated gif.

Infidel

Rius wrote: »

Thanks, man =)

I imagine that had something to do with eliminating everything from each frame that doesn't change? The 51 individual .gif files are 22-25kb each, which came out to the original 1.1mb for the animated gif.

Precisely, optimizing an animated gif is compression in that it only records differences frame to frame, which obviously are not going to be a whole lot for this. I knew it had to be doing it the full frame way if you were getting over 1mb with Blarney's art. :lol:

Rius

Hehe, yeah. Can you post how you did that? Might come in handy if/when I run another BSG game.

Edit: Looks like Darian figured it out in my game thread;

Darian wrote: »

Ah ha!

Now we only need to save our animation as GIF. Before we do that, let's optimize the animation using the <Image> Filters -> Animation -> Animation Optimize function. This will create a new image using a different mode than what we have now. You can use two different modes for every frame of your animation. You can either use the replace mode (default), which will replace the old frame with the new one. It's like taking the frame out before adding a new one. The other is the combine method, in which the new frame is added to the previous frame. That way only changes need to be updated. That's what animation optimize basically does. The file size gets tremendously smaller. Now we need to index the image using <Image>Image-> Mode -> Indexed function (Alt+I).

I had run into that problem before; it's why I haven't done any CitOW end of game gifs in a while.

I still like how you managed it with just the 1.1mb .gif and none of the individual frames, though.

Infidel

I did it on the command line. :lol: Imagemagick is a great great great tool.

convert yourfile.gif -coalesce bsg22.gif
convert bsg22.gif -layers optimize bsg22.gif

Done. I did it on my webhost directly.