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Creating Animated Gifs - #6
Reducing the file size
File size is a very important thing which needs to be kept in mind when creating animated gifs. The smaller they are in size the faster they will load on the web page. It is not the first time that animations produced have a file size over 20K. This will mean that they will take far longer to download.
Well software producers have done something to help us by creating the so called gif reducers. What is the function of these programs. These programs will act in 3 different ways:
- Palette reducers - This feature will reduce the number of colours within the animation from the original number (eg. 256) to a user defined or predefined number (eg. 64). Obviously the image will sometimes loose in quality and become dithered. In this case one can change the number of resulting colours to an acceptible level.
- Removal of Redundant pixels - This is a very cool feature. Basically the software will compare the different frames and will remove/crop any pixels which do not change from one imae to an other. Consider the following panther. It is composed of 2 frames. In the initial frame the panther has the eyes open. In the second frame the tiger has the eyes closed. The software cropped off the pixels which do not change.
This process has reduced the file size by 5,279 bytes which is equivalent to 63% of the original file size.
- Removal of Comment Blocks - Comment blocks are text annotations added to the images which do not appear in the animation. These annotations usually state who created the animated gif, and which program was used in creating them. Although the amount of bytes added to the file size may be few, some programs remove these annotations as well.
These features are shared in the majority of software packages available.
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