Lossy Compression for Animated GIFs?

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  • Lossy Compression for Animated GIFs?

    Anyone have any experience with such a feature?

    I use GIMP 2.8 and I cannot find a way to implement this type of feature to reduce the size of my animated GIFs to make them more Tumblr friendly. It seems as though any animated gifs over 1mb just turn into a frozen frame on tumblr, hence removing the point of it being animated.

    I've googled around, (which is how i came about lossy compression to begin with) but i have found NOTHING in terms of doing it on GIMP. Perhaps I'm blind and just haven't seen it. But if anyone has any advice on such a topic i would be very grateful.

    The closest thing I've found is to "Optimize for GIF" in the Filter>Animation options in GIMP.

    And as long as your knowledgeable brain is here. What other tricks are there to reducing the size of Animated GIFs? Ones i know include: Reducing Frame amount, reducing image size, Lossy Compression (even though i don't know where to find it), reducing dithering (if the image has any).

    I'm not sure how to affect colors in a way to make it so the image size decreases.

    I ended up making one work for tumblr, it's bigger than the one in my sig, but gosh it took me a while (largely due to me trying to teach myself all these things haha)
    (Le proud) It's from my first Let's Play of Cat Mario :P

    I also tried using GIF Ninja, while it is nice for making animated GIFs quickly out of videos. It quickly runs into issues with file size limitations that I mentioned earlier.

  • Cirno wrote:

    One doesn't simply make HQ .gifs without taking a considerable amount of space.

    Also the more colors your .gif has , the bigger the file is. js. Don't make sparkleparty gifs.


    That's where I feel like I'm probably struggling a little bit is with colors.

    I'm downloading Adobe Photoshop CS6 trial now. I probably should have just started with that :P

    But on the bright side. I've learned a ton with GIMP over the past couple of weeks :P

    Animated GIFs sure can be a pain! Especially for a noob 8)

    ..Meh Adobe CS6 trial is a 30 day trial. Time to figure out how much it costs in case i end up really liking it :P

  • OH MY..
    Photoshop is expensive...

    At least everywhere I've been looking O_o

    EDIT ....Or not. Gosh they have pricings on all sorts of things.

    I guess i can get a 1 year subscription edition for 20 dollars, which isn't bad at all.

    Better than the 1000$ price tag i found on it for a different version.

    EDIT Oh nevermind. its 20 dollars a month. Hmph.

    I may be GIMPing or making several e-mail accounts for trials >:D

    The post was edited 3 times, last by SwingPoynt ().

  • Ugh just typed out a solution and the website crashed when i hit post...

    Anyway...

    I figured out how to significantly reduce file size for animated GIFs while using GIMP. (I currently have GIMP 2.8)

    It did have to do with colors as suspected, But I finally figured out how to actually adjust the colors without making things look all wacky in gimp.

    You go to the menu bar at the top of GIMP and click:

    Image>mode>Indexed

    And once you are in the indexed menu you can adjust the colors via a slider. The default value that gimp sets the colors at is 255 colors out of 256. You can adjust the slider to make the total colors in the image go down. I brought mine down to 170 from 255 and didn't notice any difference in colors. I did not test to see how far i could go before there was a noticeable difference, but I'm sure that each image is affected differently anyway.

    So while I have yet to figure out the "Lossy Compression" this colors thing helps a ton. So hopefully this thread may help out some poor sap like me in the future.