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I’m Playing With Animated Gifs again.



After learning about documenting multiple product versions with a static site generator, this week we hear how Leon Barnard, Writer, Designer, and aspiring Developer at Balsamiq, figured out how to use animated GIF files in user assistance while also not annoying people with an endless looping animation. Not annoying and also not streaming video? Plus the cleanest Markdown source files you could create? Do tell.


Just because I still need this every now and then I figured the pure JS function I use might be helpful for someone else. This is a pure JS way of restarting an animated gif, without reloading it. You can call this from a link and/or document load event.




I’m playing with animated gifs again.



The animated GIF is treated just like any other object. This means you can do things like group an animated GIF with other objects in your layout and animate the group. Or make an animated GIF move in any direction by attaching it to a custom motion path. This really opens up all kinds of creative possibilities!


So at first, it looks like GIFs are DOA. However, if you look in the EPUB Interactivity Preview panel, you get the first sign of where animated GIFs might work. Preview a spread with a placed GIF and it plays just fine in the panel.


Hey! i am making a illustration book, but i want it to be more interactive, so i decided to do animated gifs. So here is te question, its possible to apply gifs that i made on photoshop, and export them to in design and be able to see the animation of the gif?


Pinterest was the first to enable animated GIFs, followed by Twitter. And by the summer of 2015, Facebook had also jumped on the GIF bandwagon. Then, Instagram changed the game with Boomerang, which lets users film and share their own GIFs. On any of these social feeds, animated GIFs can be a great way to stand out in a crowded feed.


I tested it by dragging an animated GIF into the box (instead of browsing my computer) and it even kept the animation on the dashboard card. I remember people having issues with that a month or so ago (I did test it in my beta instance).


I have done this easily in the past but for some reason I can't get a gif file to play in a new course that I had to create on Canvas (spring 2022). I can only access the pictures on my computer (doesn't even allow you to access the course files (unusual) and I've tried selecting pictures with gif extensions as well as dragging them and they don't play. I am also noticing that they are only capture a small portion of the picture from the gif file. I've tried to make to selections smaller but then I loose the animation again. This shouldn't be that hard. Something has changed???


Students can change their course cards to the extent that they can change the color of the course card or remove the color overlay that sits on top of an instructor-chosen image (so that the image appears as intended instead of having a color overlay that tints the image with that color). If an instructor chooses to use an animated GIF on a course card, I'm not aware of any way for a student to stop that animation from running on the Canvas Dashboard. Again, the image chosen on a course card on the Canvas Dashboard is something chosen by the instructor...not the student.


I've already done this, and you can see here I've got a bunch of exports that I can that I can see and use. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to select a few of these photos; I'm going to select four, and it doesn't really matter which export setting you select, all that matters is these are the frames that we're going to add into our animated GIF. Once you've selected the images that you want to create an animated GIF from, you can go up here, and instead of clicking the normal "Compress" button that you might use quite a lot for other formats, we're going to use this middle button called "Create GIF". You can you can set the quality beforehand if you want to do that, so I'm just going to bump this up to 95. Once you're happy with that you can click on this "Create GIF" button and what that's going to do is it's going to take the selected images that you've just specified in the select panel before we clicked the button, and it's going to add those into this little preview here. This preview is just looking through the four frames that we've already selected before clicking the button and it's giving us a real-time preview of that what that will look like if we were to export this to an animated GIF.


When you're happy with this preview, you can go ahead and click on this "Export to GIF" button in the bottom right down here. If I click on that, it's going to grab those frames and turn them into an animated GIF. If I save this and open it, you can see here that it's exported it exactly the way that we we saw it in the preview; so we've got these four frames looping at one frame per second, the dimensions are 512 by 300, and because it's being set to "cover", there's no gaps whatsoever and and the dithering option that we selected looks really nice, it's very smooth, we can't see any artifacts, can't see any nasty pixel blurring, and overall it's just looking really good. Even at quality 95, it's actually saved out at a reasonable file size, we've got 488 kilobytes for this animated GIF, and I'd say it's it's actually turned out quite well.


So, that's that's a pretty good overview of how to export compressed animated GIFs from Figma using TinyImage. You can actually play around with this slider a little bit more; you're not going to see huge amounts of differences between these different qualities for GIFs in particular, but you will get a little bit of difference. If you do want to play around with file sizes, I would encourage you just to mess about with some of these maybe at the extremes to get a bit of an idea of what those size difference is going to be, but for the most part you can you can still get away with fairly high settings and and have fairly small file sizes as well.


You will now have an animated GIF taken from a folder full of the individual frames. In fact, as long as each frame exists as a separate layer in Photoshop, the Animation/Timeline palette can be used to create the GIF. But, with CS5, CS6, or Creative Cloud (CC) it is easy to make separate layers from a folder of the individual frames as described.


Hi, Have a very weird experience. whenever I save GIF even after playing with options around, its not clear. The images develop dirty pixels. How can that be avoided and keep the GIF crisp and original?I also wanted to know how can we make the effect of fading to second image. Because current setting just swaps image. I will appreciate your help.


Hi Joana,Try opening the image in a web browser like Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer. If the animation was saved, it will definitely show there. Windows Photo Viewer (if that is what you are displaying the image with) will not show the animation, only the first frame.


Great tutorial. Just what I needed. Enabled me to do a animated banner very quickly and using photoshop which I already had without the need to look for specialist software. I didn;t even realise Photoshop could do this.


Thanks for the tutorial! Ever since i got Ps cs6,i was looking for websites or videos to help me make animated gifs,but none of them helped.When i found your tutorial,it helped me step-by-step.Thanks a million :)


Hi there is it possible to create an animated Gif and make it play when someone hovers over the Gif and then stops when they move away from the gif, is it possible to do this without coding but natively in PS or another Gif making program


Your email designer or email marketing colleague has approached you with a request: they want to include an animated GIF in their next email. Nice! Graphics Interchange Formats (GIFs) are an easy way of adding something fun to your digital marketing.


Use conditional code to show GIF-supporting email clients your animated GIF while providing non-GIF-supporting clients with a static image that provides the same information, look, and feel as your animation. The conditional shows Outlook desktop clients the static fallback image while all other subscribers see your GIF.


i have an iPhone 5s. I used to be able to save gifs in my camera roll and send them in text messages. I know that the gifs don't loop when I'm looking at them in the camera roll, but they used to be fine once I sent them on. Now, whenever I try to save and send a gif, it always mains a static image. What's weird is that this only started being the case a couple days ago. Any gifs I have in my camera roll before that time still work just fine once sent. any new gifs I try to save remain static, but I don't know why. I assume the files just aren't saving correctly, but I haven't changed any settings on my phone recently. I did run an ios update recently, but I cant recall if this aligns with the timing of my gif-saving problem. I saw somewhere that you have to have SMS/MMS enabled, which I had to go manually do. This helped for one instance of gif, but the. Immediately stopped working again. I've been Googling the heck out of this, but no one else seems to have had quite this issue. Does anyone know how I can fix this?


I've experienced the same thing for several weeks. All the animated GIFs I had in my Photos album suddenly were frozen on the first frame. They would not play in iMessage. Also, when attempting to save new animated gifs, they were frozen in both iMessage and Safari. This started simultaneously on both my iPhone 6S and iPad Air 2.


Today I just saved a new animated GIF file from Safari on my iPad, and found it playing. Sent it to myself in iMessage and it was working fine. Checked iPhone too and it seems most of my GIFs are working again on both devices. No idea why this happened or how I resolved it. 2ff7e9595c


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