Hey everyone,
Getting ready to start on my new project... finally... and wanted to learn a little bit about animated gifs.

I'm going to create one for my homepage, and saw something about the program Construction Set (shareware) for creating them... wondering if anybody has any experience with some easy to use programs to create animated gifs...

Really, the effect that I'm going for is to swap out an image for a site... nothing too complicated.

My next concern though is about file size.  Since it seems that animated gifs must be save at 256 colors, and the images that I'm going to be swaping out, looping through, are going to be about 400x300, I'm worried about the file sizes and that this rotating gif may be several hundred KBs.

Is there something that I can do to the images to lower image weight without losing quality... for instance, I hear that Debabelizer lets you strip out useless tags and pare down file size behind the scenes without loosing quality.  Does anyone have any experience here, or can you recommend a way to do this with some shareware or in Photoshop.

Thanks in advance for the advice, hope that everyone had a happy holidays and great New Year...
Starke

Yeah, I've thought about using flash, and may go that direction in the future... probably will because it's cleaner and there are more effects.

I will check out the coffeecup software.

Any thoughts about decreasing image file size without decreasing colors, dimensions... with a program like debabelizer but shareware?

Also, why do you avoid animated gifs... know the javascript method, thought an animated gif might be better.

Regarding compression, I typically use photoshop... I'm not really a graphics person, but can get around the block when I need to...

Is there a special way to save with greater compression in photoshop 7.0.  Typically, I'll 'save for web', this shows me the file sizes when I'm choosing the format and number of colors when saved.

Debabelizer, as I understand it, is a program that strips out tons of extra background information that's also saved with an image.  Typically, an image is not just 0's and 1's representing pixels, but much more info too. (not an expert here, so if you are, please give my explanation a wide berth).  Most of this background information is unneeded.

I've seen some programs that allow you to remove alot of this garbage, and scene the results where you can keep picture quality, but lower image size by up to 80%.

I'd even search for these types of programs, but I"m not exactly sure of the search phrases to look for...

Most picture editing software should give you an option of "no compression" or "LZW compression" (or words to that effect) for GIF image files. I don't know of other compression methods available for GIF files, but there might be others. Some editors don't do the compression, because for a long time LZW was patented (Unisys) and most authors refused to either pay the licensing fee or break the law. Most recent levels of picture editors should permit compression, and may even do it by default since the patent expired.


Wow, 80% is quite good! Are you sure this is specific to GIF files? I didn't know there was that much garbage in these files -- makes you wonder why it's there if it has no effect. If they really are compressing GIF files by 80 or 90%, I suspect that they're doing some subtle tricks to reduce the number of colors, which leads to better compression (at the cost of poorer picture quality). They may also be stripping out "useless" stuff like copyright notices! Of course, they're comparing it to a raw, uncompressed file.


GIF, compression, LZW

Sorry I should of said animations, they are annoying