How to post an animated GIF?

**Contours** · 22 May 2014, 03:24 PM

The manage attachment feature indicates that GIF is an accepted file format. Yet, attaching a GIF converts it to a JPG.

Is there a different procedure for animated GIFs? Is ZIP the answer?

Thanks for any assistance.

**gwpriester** · 22 May 2014, 04:15 PM

I think there is a way to do this. I'll try to see if someone here remembers how to embed the GIF.

**Egg Bramhill** · 22 May 2014, 07:14 PM

There's no problem uplaoding animated gif's to TG. See below. Why your's is being converted to a jpg I've no idea.

**Contours** · 23 May 2014, 12:51 AM

I posted my example as a ZIP. Can you extract the file and post it to the thread from your PC?

I'd begin to suspect a browser-related condition if your post works. I run Pale Moon, a derivative of FireFox. But I've never encountered a problem like this.

**Egg Bramhill** · 23 May 2014, 01:14 AM

Here's your (cut down) animation. (if TG allows for such a large file size).

**Egg Bramhill** · 23 May 2014, 01:20 AM

That's the answer. Your gif , even reduced in size is 2Mb+ and TG won't host it at that size & converts it to jpg.

Here's the gif without the filesize restriction.:
http://www.parkeston.com/fun/big-gif/bad-gif.gif

But 2 Mb+ is not the way to create an animation

**Contours** · 23 May 2014, 04:18 AM

I think we're talking different things. My original GIF was just over 90 Kbytes. And you're saying the Xara-cropped result was over 2 Mbytes.

So, I see why your result wouldn't post ... but not why my original wouldn't.

Did you try to unzip and post my original? (it should have unzipped to 91,352 bytes)

**theinonen** · 23 May 2014, 07:45 AM

Wild guess, the original GIF image has more than 256 colours and because of that is converted to JPG file on upload. (GIF file can have 256 colours per frame but every frame can have own palette.)

**Egg Bramhill** · 23 May 2014, 01:51 PM

No that's not the case. Xara exports a gif at 256 colours regardless of the actual number of colours.

**theinonen** · 23 May 2014, 02:20 PM

I use Peter Hartleys excellent InterGif utility for animated GIF files and when I was trying to extract the invidual frames of animation from the file in Contours ZIP file for cropping, it gave me a warning if the palette was set to use existing palette.

"Please choose a palette-reduction option when using images with more than 256 colours."

So I guess there are more than 256 colours in the file, even if there are no more than 256 colours in a single frame. If the colour palette changes between the frames then the total number of invidual colours in whole file will actually be higher than 256.

But I am only guessing here so can be totally wrong. (Nothing new...)