Shoutbox

Yeah, is there no way to choose a .gif bigger than 200kB as your display picture?
200kB is crazy small for a .gif.

The reason i think its dumb, is because you can still pick other normal pictures of ANY size.. I mean i can pick a 5mb ultra-res picture, and my contacts wont see it until its downloaded.
But picking a 700kB .gif? Oh god no ^_^

Any other picture you upload as a display picture gets reduce in size when it's sent to the server before being downloaded to your contacts' computer......seeing as this is a relatively straightforward thing to do, they don't put a restriction on it.

There's no easy, automatic way that I know of to reduce the quality of an animated gif, hence the restriction.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Baleur
200kB is crazy small for a .gif.

---

Actually, 200KB is crazy big for a gif.... Especially for a display picture.

An animated gif is not meant to be a full blown movie. Also, almost any average animated gif can be reduced in filesize by a great deal (without loosing quality) if you make it properly.

A big mistake is to store each frame as a full blown image. In (gif) animation this is really not the proper way of doing things. You only need to save the region that changes. Together with this, another mistake is to save the images (or individual frames for that matter) as 256 color images while only like 40 colors are used for example. And, as with most pictures of DP size and purpose, you can often reduce the used colors quite a lot without anyone noticing anything. Not to mention that quite often way too many frames are stored and you can often do with far less frames.

So, 200Kb is very big for a gif, even for an animated gif.
And especially if you want to use something like that as a display picture because then it means your contacts need download 200Kb each time, just for a display picture.

I would suggest to use the proper tools to reduce the animation and file size. Tools like GIF Constructions Set.

Sry for the bump , but CookieRevised .. could you make a tutorial cause i can't understand jack sh*t what your talking about

No, unfortunatly I don't have the time to write a tutorial if you don't know what I'm talking about. There is simply way to much to explain in that case, sorry.

But there are tutorials on the web though.

Although there are not that many decent tutorials around. Most tutorials simply talk about how to create an animated gif in for example PhotoShop etc. But almost all of them forget to explain the inner workings of a GIF, and why you need to do certain things in a certain way. Which is all extremely important. As a result, most of the animated GIFs you'll find on the web are stupidly big, people complain about size limitations, and other people try to convert full blown movies into GIFs and then wonder why their filesize is so big or why it looks so crappy....

Anyways, one of the very very very few tutorials I've found which explains a bit what you MUST know and COMPLETELY understand (imho) in order to make decent animated GIFs is: http://www.webreference.com/dev/gifanim/

Although it might seem quite a lot to take in, and you might want to think to skip some stuff, every piece of information in that tutorial is important though (including the old contest and its results). So, in order to understand it all, it would take some days of reading and quite a lot of practice and looking at GIFs found on the web, but it is worth it.

---

Here are two examples from that tutorial which shows what it is all about. Both animations looks the same. But the first image is 21.069 bytes big, the second is only 4.230 bytes big!!!.
                                                         

The first animation is what you get when you follow like 99,9% of all tutorials and how-to's which you'll find on the web about creating an animated GIF. The second animation is something you'll get when you know what you're doing and apply some (easy) techniques.