Tips for Creating Animated Gifs

1. Remember not all browsers support gif89a animations. Some browsers display the last frame, and some browsers display the first frame of an animation. To accomodate all browsers, make sure that the first and last frames of the animation are legible. You can copy and paste a frame very easily. Select the frame in Gif Construction Set, select Edit/Copy. Then select the block before where you want to place the frame. Be sure to cut and paste a Control Block for the frame of animation as well.

2. You can easily set the number of times an animation repeats. Simply open the animation in Gif Construction Set, select the Loop Block, and select Edit. Any gif animation can be repeated in a web browser by selecting Refresh or Reload.

3. You can repeat a single animated gif. It will only load once for the viewer at your web site, so you can create an impressive field of motion for very little bandwidth.

4. Which type of palette to use? When you bring in an image to Gif Construction Set, it will ask how you want to deal with the color palette. The image on the right (below) was created by using a Global Palette. The second image was created by selecting Use Local Palette for each image that was imported in. Each image started out as an 8 bit (256 color) gif created in Photoshop, and indexed to an adaptive, dithered, 256 color palette.

Image Dithered using a Global Palette(9K)Image Dithered using a Local Palette for each Image(17K)

5. If you start out with smaller gifs, do you end up with smaller gif animations? Yes, you do. Below is an animation that started out as a group of 5bit gifs, and the animation was compiled by using a Local Palette for each individual gif. Compare to the 8 bit gif.

5 Bit Image Dithered using a Local Palette for each Image(12K) 8 Bit Image Dithered using a Local Palette for each Image(17K)

6. Gif or Jpg to start with? The images that make up the gif animation below on the left were saved in Photoshop as high quality gifs, and opened in Gif Construction Set with a Local Palette for each image. It's clear that Gif Construction Set does not dither as well as Photoshop.

JPG Image Dithered using a Local Palette for each Image(15K) 8 Bit Image Dithered using a Local Palette for each Image(17K)

7. Those .THN files that Gif Construction Set leaves behind? Consider them Gif89 droppings and throw 'em out. No use for them that I know of!

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