The GIMP-gifsicle-plugin:
Save layers as gif-animation
Why this, gimp already has "save-gif-animation"?
That feature is good for animations that don't require more than 256
colors for all frames. If you wanna make one from some photos, you'll
notice that ugly, heavy dithering is introduced. This is due to a
fundamental limitation of The GIMP: in indexed mode, it can only have
one colormap (with at most 256 colors) for all frames (or layers),
whereas a GIF-file can have one such colormap for each frame (plus a
global one).
This plugin (with the help of the external "gifsicle"-program) produces
GIF-animations with a local colormap for each frame (if thats required).
Another little benefit of gifsicle is the ability to specify a loop
count (instead of just "once"/"forever").
Other than that, it should behave exactly like gimps save-gif-animation:
Strings like (123ms) (combine) (replace) in the layer-attributes are
honored, and also the lowest layer in the list is displayed at first.
Of course, there's a little price to pay:
- its much slower
- it needs temporary disk space
You will need:
- The GIMP with perl support
- perl
- The Gifsicle program
- Lots of libraries - ask your friendly package-manager...
On Debian, an "apt-get install gimp libgimp-perl gifsicle"
should suffice to meet all the above requirements.
Then throw the (unzipped)
plugin into $HOME/.gimp-x.y/plug-ins/ or /usr/lib/gimp/x.y/plug-ins/,
chmod a+x it, start gimp and click Filters/Animation/Gifsicle...
| Screenshots:
 |