ImageReady: Animated GIF File Sizes Increase With Changes to Frame Order

Hello everyone.

I'm experiencing an issue in ImageReady that I have never noticed before.

When designing an animated GIF, I sometimes design it with the frames "out of order" and then reposition them before saving the file so that they are in the correct order. While doing this last night, I noticed that as I changed the frame order, the file size of the animated GIF increased rather dramatically... by 5 or 6k.

I was not previously aware that changing the frame order would have an impact on file size, letalone a change this dramatic (5-6k may not seem like much, but when the image is supposed to be only 15k, it makes quite a difference).

Is this normal (and just something that I happen to have missed these last few years)? Or is there something wrong with my copy of Photoshop/ImageReady?

Thanks.

This is only a guess, but can you try save as with a new file name. In some applications from Adobe this reduces some overhead and makes files smaller. It shouldn't affect a GIF, but who knows.

Also, is it possible that moving a frame leaves a hidden copy somewhere?

You have to understand how GIF animation compression works, in order to understand what is going on. I could explain part of it here, but better is to find the info via google.

I once made an animated GIF which had two moving areas at either end of a wide banner ad. Instead of 10 frames, in which both areas change in each frame, I made 20.

That 20 frame GIF ended up less than half the size of the 10 frame version, but looked just as good. That's why it's good to know what's going on under the hood.

Try:

1 - click the flyout triangle in Animation window

2 - select optimise animation

3 - File > Save as optimised.

Some animated GIFs contain stuff that is merely different from layer n and layer n+1.

Maybe the optimization has been shoogled a bit?

If you are into experimenting try:
4 - save a copy of the GIF

5 - open it in The Gimp

6 - Filter > Animate > optimize > save out as another GIF

7 - Try sequential saves using something easily based on above workflow then check file sizes to see if repeated application of the optimization algorithm sorts stuff out.

Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't - you may be lucky.

Scott

The other thing to do is to slice your image, and only have the animated portions as animated GIF and the rest as static.

It results in several files, that have to be positioned adjacent to each other, but the total size can be far less then the size of a single animated GIF.