Shoutbox

True, but unless you know how to make a good animation, those optimizers can't do much either though. They can't optimize a file which isn't made with optimization in mind. They can make something good better, but they can't make something good out of something bad. Or another famous IT saying which is on its place in regards to all this: garbage in = garbage out.

By a good animation I mean for example removing stray or random pixels which don't add to the animation but do enlarge the needed frame size. This is the most biggest and common error that people make when they create GIF animations.

Also reducing your palette will decrease file size a lot. Optimizers can often do this too in some way, but they aren't smart. eg: they don't know the context of the animation or what colors are important or more visible than others, etc.

Making your animation with a reduced palette size in mind will already help optimizers and quite often will reduce file size a lot more (thus without any visible reduction if you do it yourself) than optimizer can do (which often does result in visible reduction).

In fact, if you are able to make good animations you don't need any optimizer at all and your file would quite often be smaller than what an optimizer could have made.

Even knowing the difference between interlaced and progressive scan fo example, and using their benefits can often reduce the file size further....

Quite often GIF animations made by the most common and most known GIF editors (even with the use of optimizers) can be reduced like 50% or more and without visible quality loss if you know what you're doing. See all those threads in the past about those emoticon animations people made for the forum.

Even Microsoft's own emoticons which have animation in them are often not well made and can be reduced more if you remake them and alter some pixels here and there...

All in all, 200kb for a GIF animation is realy a massive amount.