I made the sign smiley below at millan.net. It is a .gif file, is a four-frame animation and it is RGB mode. How is an animated gif file made that is RGB mode?

Is it possible to do in GIMP?

http://www.millan.net/minimations/smile ... rator.html

Additional note: The background is transparent.

GIF's can't be any more then 256 colors O; there was a project called gifsicle which adapted the colors per frame (as opposed to a single color set for all frames) which can equivalently give you more then 256 colors for the complete animation. Hope that helps.

Bummer, it doesn't show in my menus. I checked in usr/bin and perl is in there. The plugin is allowed to execute as a program.

It's supposed to be in Filters > Animation > Animation Attributes.

I closed and re-opened GIMP twice, it doesn't show in the plug-in browser either. Do perl plug-ins go somewhere besides the .gimp-2.6 > plug-ins folder?

Later: I don't have gifscicle and the only Linux distribution is for Debian. Looks like I won't be able to use it.

I find this this page rather interesting.

That is interesting, GnuTux. So, a somewhat RGB mode is possible with a gif.

That is pretty cool Tux; wonder why they won't port this capability inside GIMP? I believe this must be how gifcycle does it too (but not sure). Still cool.

Unfortunately, the links to how to compile, etc., on the ANGIF library page are all dead links.

From what I can gather, there is nothing inherent about an 8 bit color limit in the gif format. It's just that all the early video cards could only produce 8 bit color, so all the apps followed suit and that became the standard.

Considering the size issues with hi-color gif, it's probably preferable to go with a compressed png and/or animated png these days.

The file itself is not in RGB.


The GIF file format has the rarely-used capability to support a separate color palette for each layer. Each of these palettes can have up to 256 colors, thus allowing for more than 256 colors in the resulting file.

GIMP's does not support this "multiple palette" indexed mode capability; however, when loading a GIF file which has multiple palettes, GIMP will convert the image to RGB mode so as not to lose any of the colors.

Oh My Gasp! Look at all the ninjas!