Mikey Z on May 22nd 2013
1979 views

Paint: Animated GIF import not working?!

Well, ok, I'll give you that it at least opens the first frame...

I just tried to open a GIF I was working on in another program, and while I know I had saved at least 9 frames, I only got the first one opened. What's going on here? No error message or anything, but Paint is just treating it like a normal 1-frame image. And yes, I hit "open as an animated image". I only get the first frame.

Vlasta on May 22nd 2013 0

Could you send me the .gif file to info@rw-designer.com ?

Anonymous on May 23rd 2013 0

I have it on my Google drive, I was going to share it with a few others anyway.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0kAnY24HnWFUl9lU0d3S3cxd0k/edit?usp=sharing

NOTE TO FUTURE READERS: I may delete it sometime to conserve space. Sorry!

Mikey Z on May 23rd 2013 0

Sorry, forgot to log in. That's me up there.

Another thing to add, yes the image works fine in everything else, but Paint just doesn't open it right. Previous editing was done using Flash from a computer at school.

Vlasta on May 23rd 2013 0

I looked at the image and it was as I suspected. The image has frame duration times set to 0 for all frames. If interpreted literally (which RWPaint does), this means there should be no delay between the frames and in consequence the whole animation has zero length (and RWPaint reduces it to the last frame, not the first one).

On the other hand, most (but not all) other programs consider frames with 0 duration invalid and replace the 0 with some other value. In the past (and possibly still in the present), there were programs that produced gif files with this invalid frame duration value. It makes sense, especially for web browsers, to "fix" and disregard the 0 duration. But in my opinion, this is not the right behavior. Look for example at this page. It has a special truecolor gif that is not supposed to be animated, but the browser incorrectly animates it, while RWPaint opens it correctly as a single image.

Here is some more info about how browsers deal with invalid frame durations.

So, what to do? If you can open the gif in the program you have originally used to create it and assign a valid frame duration and re-save it, it should work correctly in RWPaint.

I'll also modify the gif decoder to somehow distinguish two cases (0 duration being an error introduced by bad encoder and 0 duration being intentional to workaround the 256 color limitation) and eventually fix the gif. If you want to try an early version that works with this particular image you can get RWCodecImageGIF.dll and replace the original.

Mikey Z on May 25th 2013 0

Thanks a bunch! Awesome!

Apparently Adobe doesn't like GIFs because the exporter built into Flash doesn't work well. The frame rate settings didn't carry over. Weird :P