Use ImageMagick to resize, flip, mirror, rotate, distort, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves. It can read and write images in a variety of formats (over 200) including PNG, JPEG, GIF, HEIC, TIFF, DPX, EXR, WebP, Postscript, PDF, and SVG. Be sure to read the documentation Animation Basics documentation, and the section on how to optimize your animated images.ImageMagick® is used to create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images. ImageMagick is far more powerful than what I've covered here. You can include a file twice within the list if you'd like it to appear more than once in the animation. A file named gifframe10.png will be inserted before gifframe2.png.Įven though it's more verbose, I recommend specifying the list of input files in the order you'd like them to appear. If you do so, be aware that ImageMagick will assemble those images in alphanumeric order. You can also pass a wildcard argument - e.g. Both files will be stitched together to form IAmAnimating.gif. The next three bits of the command indicate the paths to our input and output files: start.png and end.png. Each frame visually stacks atop the one before it. Without -dispose previous, you'd end up with the mess in Figure 1.įigure 1: What happens when you don't use the -dispose flag. In this case, -dispose previous hides the prior frame. dispose, indicates what should happen when the frame changes. Five times is enough to catch the viewer's attention, without being an ongoing distraction on the page. Here, I've chosen to have it repeat five times. A value of 0 ( -loop 0) will cause your GIF to loop infinitely. The -loop flag indicates how many times the GIF should repeat. This works out to a -delay value of 34, or thirty-four hundredths of a second. Note: The World Wide Web Consortiums Web Content Accessibility Guidelines say that content should not flash or blink more than three times per second. One second is well above the safety threshhold to avoiding triggering seizures in most cases. Animations can cause seizures in some viewers. In this case, the value is 100, or one second. The -delay flag indicates how many hundreths of a second the GIF should pause before displaying the next frame. For example:Ĭonvert -delay 100 -loop 5 -dispose previous start.png end.png iamanimating.gif Then run the convert command to stitch your images together. Once you've exported your frames, navigate to the directory where you've saved them. Which format you use doesn't matter much ImageMagick will convert them to GIF. I'm using the phrase image frame here because we'll turn them into frames, but they're just separate image files. Saving them to the same directory makes things easier to manage. For other software packages, such as Acorn, you may need to use separate layers or separate files.Įxport each image frame to a bitmap format such as GIF, PNG, or JPEG. I used Sketch to create my images, and used a separate artboard for each frame. Each frame should have the same dimensions. How to create image framesĬreate your image frames using the software of your choice. Now you're ready to stitch together some image frames. You'll have to figure out how to use them on your own. There are binary downloads of ImageMagick available for Windows. Note for Windows users: I haven't used Windows for the better part of this millennium. The -y flag is optional, and means “Yes.” Passing it will skip the apt confirmation prompt. On macOS, you can install it with Homebrew. If you do not have ImageMagick installed, install it. Otherwise you'll see command not found or something similar. If ImageMagick is installed, you'll see a copyright notice and a list of commands. Ubuntu Linux users, use Ctrl + Alt + T to open one. You may already have it ImageMagick installed. You'll just need a couple of tools: the image editing software of your choice and ImageMagick. But I've never created one “from scratch” by stitching together my own frames.Īs it turns out, it's very easy to do. I've created them with ffmpeg by exporting frames from video files. I've created animated GIFs using Fireworks back when it was owned by Macromedia. So instead, I turned to that classic format: the animated GIF. Unfortunately, email support for SVG and CSS is not very good. I've used both for animation elsewhere on this site. Ordinarily, I'd use SVG and CSS for this. While creating the Happy New Year edition issue of the newsletter, I decided that it might be cool to animate the accompanying image.
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