How to shrink an over 6k-avatar to under 6k

jbone · Post by **jbone** » Thu Aug 01, 2002 2:35 pm

1) go to <A HREF=http://www.jasc.com/products/psp/>http: ... ts/psp/</A> and download the evaluation version of Paint Shop Pro 7 with Animation Shop 3.

2) Install Paint Shop Pro 7 with Animation Shop 3.

3) Run Animation Shop 3.

4) Open your animation.

5) Open the "file" menu and choose "optimization wizard."

6) Read the options, and choose "animated GIF"

7) Here's the meat of it - you can reduce your color depth to shrink the file's size, you can tell it to remove non-visible elements, you can tell it to reduce frame count or collapse colors to remove redundant elements - just read through the menus and try different things.

8) Save your new animated GIF and upload it.

Much of the time, you should be able to sufficiently shrink an animated GIF sufficiently. However, with some highly-complex animations, it may not wirk.

Flint the Dwarf · Post by **Flint the Dwarf** » Thu Aug 01, 2002 10:34 pm

Wow, coincidentally I was just wondering this. Thanks!

"However, with some highly-complex animations, it may not wirk."

There goes one alternative avatar. And... I'm sure you know this but 'wirk' should be 'work'

. Yeah I know the keys are right next to each other. Some day jbone, I'll get you for a real error! You just wait! I really don't know why. I guess I'm just weird.

jbone · Post by **jbone** » Thu Aug 01, 2002 10:48 pm

Flint, before you go and try to reduce the filesize of an animated gif, don't you think you should try to crop your current avatar down within the site's specifications?

jbone · Post by **jbone** » Thu Aug 01, 2002 10:49 pm

Oh, and I also used the word "sufficiently" redundantly. But who's counting.

jbone · Post by **jbone** » Sun Aug 04, 2002 1:25 am

OK, here's a good example. Take Garylisk's current avatar:

This avatar weighs in at a whopping 27K, <I>far</I> too large to be submitted to the site.
However, after some careful tweaking:

By resizing it down to 60x60 pixels, reducing the number of colors used to 16, and removing unnecessary/redundant information, the GIF has been reduced in size to just over 5K! That's a reduction in size of approximately 22K. Now, the avatar can easily be uploaded to the site. True, it may not look perfect when compared to the original - but, as the saying goes, "it's good enough for government work."

(Feel free to snag this for your own personal use, Garylisk.)

kthulhu · Post by **kthulhu** » Sun Aug 04, 2002 2:08 am

I use <a href="http://www.irfanview.com/">Irfanview</a> for non-static images. Less fancy than PSP or Photoshop, but it's my numero uno image program for most things.