Animated gif utilities

what do people like?

[tedster]

I'm very frustrated. After some early trials way back when, I settled on a fovorite utility for animated gifs and used it exclusively for a long time. It had a simple, intuitive interface for doing all the basics, and some nifty controls for optimizing the global palette, exporting single frames, etc.

I lost the program when I upgraded systems, so I forked over some dough for the latest version -- and what a mess it has become! Some of these changes may be restrictions imposed by that stupid gif patent thingie, but now the whole interface is just plain user-hostile. I usually know what I need to do, but now I always need to take about 6 more steps to do it. And instead of exporting a frame, I actually end up taking a screen shot!

So I'm wondering, what utilites do people favor for gif animation today? Freeware is always nice, but effectiveness matters the most to me.

[chris_f]

Check you sticky as I don't like spamming this forum with program names incase it encourages people to do so.

[tedster]

Thanks Chris. I appreciate your suggestion. As it turns out, this is the very program I was complaining about. You don't happen to have an earlier version on floppy or something, do you?

[knighty]

Well I have to say good old Fireworks for me, not free but I could'nt imagine web life without it.

[Stickymaster]

I use Adobe Image Ready. Comes with Photoshop and does the trick for me.

Fireworks is also good but I prefer Image ready for it's ties with Photoshop.

Stickymaster.

[mivox]

Is GifBuilder the program you lost? That's what I use... simple and fast as heck.

A while ago, when we got a CDRW drive for the office, I made a CD backup of all my favorite shareware and freeware utilities I had installed... all those little must-haves I didn't want to worry about hunting down again if I had to rebuild my system. I've been very thankful for that disc more than once.

[Thors Hammer]

Fireworks gets my vote.

"Is GifBuilder the program you lost? That's what I use... simple and fast as heck."

- Hee Hee, I remember that program, and I liked that one now that I remember it. ;)

Thor

[tedster]

What I lost was Ulead Gif Animator (either v.3 or v.4) I picked up v.5 and wept for what was lost.

I have both Fireworks 4 and Photoshop 6 (with ImageReady) but I find them both awkward when it comes to building or editing the animation. I like to run very tight palette and positioning controls on the individual frames, so I usually build each frame in Photoshop itself and then "glue" them together in another program. I don't like automation of important decisions.

Maybe Fireworks or ImageReady can give me what I want (global palette optimisation, redundant pixel reduction, easy timing changes on the individual frames, easy "replace method" options). But I haven't climbed the learning curve for either, and both of them have interfaces and Help files that seem inscrutable.

[mivox]

No good for image generation, of course... but if you supply the series of images, it will let you tweak and control almost every part of the final animated gif.

[pcguru333]

I use Jasc's Animation Shop (I create images in PSP)

I haven't any experience outside this software, but it has been easy to use and has always done what I needed it to do.

[kingkelly]

Ya, Animation Shop is what iuse too. Easy, gif optimization is kick arse, and theres a bunch of effects you can use. I also like Animagic Gif Animator-- got me started on animated gifs............