Can Xara Pro X9 crop a GIF?

[Contours]

If have an animated GIF that's 1280x1024. I need to drop off about 200 pixels from the right side and at the bottom ... so that the result is closer to 1024x800. IOW, I want to crop the image, not shrink it.

I've opened the GIF in Xara and can work with the individual frames. But I can't see a way to perform a wholesale crop.

Does anyone have experience with this?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[zaphodeist]

You could make a rectangle coloured to fit the background you will be using, cut out a 1024x800 hole in this and position over the first image as required then copy & paste to the other frames.

Bit cumbersome I know ... I expect there's a better way :-)

[Egg Bramhill]

A possible method might be to import the animated gif, then go to Utilities / Options and reduce the page size to 824 x 800 and re-export the animation.

[Contours]

Thanks for the replies ... but I couldn't get anywhere with either method.

Opening the GIF brought it up as a 500-pixel-wide set of frames ... the first frame, anyway. The others seemed to be shifted—or maybe centered. I was able to Intersect Shapes to get the proper size first frame, but the resulting Export Animation produced a mess of a result.

Opening a new graphic and then importing the GIF resulted in a File Placeholder as the graphic, which was cropped into a somewhat letter-size image. But there were no subsequent frames.

Hopefully, someone has done this. I'll be surprised if I'm the first one trying.

[Egg Bramhill]

Can you post a link to your animated gif, I'll have a look and see what I can do.

[wizard509]

How many frames does it have? Just wondering because I can think of another possibility that should work if the number there aren't an excessive number of frames.

[Contours]

I've learned a lot about GIFs in the last couple of days. But most of what I've learned has been outside of Xara's realm. Although I've conjured up a way to get what I need at the moment, I'd still like to bring the Xara tools to bear on the problem.

Egg, thanks for your offer. I've attached a simplified Example GIF. It's captured by a tiny recorder program called GIFCam.exe

The reported size in 169 frames. But the main thing to note is that the file is less than 90K bytes. Obviously, the GIFCam program uses some great compression.

BTW, if we can work this out, this might be a really good way to prepare "snippet" tutorials of Xara methods.

EDIT: I just noticed that the attachment manager converted my GIF to a JPG ... although is says GIFs are supported.

How can I attach my GIF?

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Contour,

probably the best way for me to view your gif is just to upload it and supply me with a link to it. GIFCam.exe is not going to help me view your animation at all.

[Contours]

Hi Contour,

probably the best way for me to view your gif is just to upload it and supply me with a link to it.

Sorry, but I don't see a way to do that. [Add] and then [Upload] immediately turns it into a 13.2Kb JPG. There's no indication that the 89Kb GIF is on the server.

Are there instructions anywhere?

[theinonen]

Using Dropbox and putting direct link for the file in posting is one option.