Creating a GIF animation from PNG files

Question

Is there a tool to create a gif animation from a set of png files?

I tried the convert command from the ImageMagick suite, but this doesn't always succeed. Also, I have several issues with this:

I can't tell what the progress is.
No matter what I try, the -delay flag doesn't change the frame rate of the gif animation.
convert determines the frame order based upon the alphabetical order of the files names. This means that name500.png will be placed right after name50.png and not after name450.png I can fix this by adding 0's but this is annoying.

[News] There is a massive overlap between Ubuntu Stackexchange and Unix Stackexchange. I tried to categorize some threads here. — hhh, Dec 30 '12 at 01:07
Regarding item 3., you can still use convert after sorting the files. Probably, something like this works files=$(ls name*png | sort -n -tname -k1); convert $files animation.gif — altroware, Jun 11 '17 at 16:26
For Point 1: convert has a -monitor parameter that tracks the process — Curlew, Dec 03 '18 at 22:02
@hhc - all the categorization is just a link to an answer with 5 links; only one of them seems related, but is just a link to the above question. - A comment by @Luke gives a simple solution: convert -delay 200 -loop 0 *.jpg output.gif. — cipricus, Oct 26 '19 at 22:11

score 120 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 20 '23 at 13:57

120

ImageMagick's convert is a handy command line tool to do that. cd to the folder containing your png-files and run this command:

convert -delay 10 -loop 0 *.png animation.gif

Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1132058

edited Jun 20 '23 at 13:57

Thomas Fritz

15

answered Nov 05 '11 at 19:32

RobinJ

1,527

15

The question mentions convert and some problems using it. Your answer doesn't address any of them. – Mat Nov 06 '11 at 00:36
4

As of ImageMagick version 6.8.7-4 2013-11-02 Q16 this worked for me. – Rudy Matela Nov 06 '13 at 17:11
10

This works, but 10 means 10 * 10ms, so pretty fast. A delay of a 100 is 1 second. – Anne van Rossum Sep 27 '15 at 08:01
11

use option -dispose previous or -dispose 2 if you are working with transparent PNGs – Hải Phong Aug 31 '16 at 01:00
How can you do then the reverse? Here https://stackoverflow.com/a/12828048/54964 – Léo Léopold Hertz 준영 Jun 05 '17 at 14:07
10

note to myself: brace expansion can be helpful for specifying the list of images as arguments, for example pic_{0..20..2}.png expands to pic_0.png, pic_2.png all the way to pic_20.png – Yibo Yang Sep 06 '17 at 02:51
1

@AnnevanRossum It's in centiseconds these days – Simd Jun 01 '23 at 19:25

score 63 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 05 '15 at 19:33

63

Newer versions of ffmpeg have no -sameq (see faq) but do have GIF support.
ffmpeg -i %03d.png output.gif
Where %03d is the frame ID in 3 digits.

You may also try to use ffmpeg to create a movie out of a sequence of images and then convert the movie to a GIF animation (again using ffmpeg).

# cf. http://pages.uoregon.edu/noeckel/MakeMovie.html

# first convert an image sequence to a movie
ffmpeg -sameq -i %03d.jpg output.mp4

# ... and then convert the movie to a GIF animation
ffmpeg -i output.mp4 -pix_fmt rgb24 -s qcif -loop_output 0 output.gif

edited Nov 05 '15 at 19:33

Fredrik Lundin

3
2

answered Nov 07 '11 at 11:09

nano

678

14

This instruction is out of date. – pronebird Jul 16 '14 at 19:03
3

The sameq option is not available anymore. Further, for me, this overwrites the original image files and does not produce a valid movie file. – Lode Nov 08 '14 at 18:57
What's the point of leaving the -sameq code there? Why would you even want to use a lossy video format (output.mp4) as a temporary? And if so, why "same quality" as the input, instead of very high bitrate? Artifacting from that is just going to make things worse for the GIF encoder. If you did need to use a video as a temporary, you'd want to use something lossless like huffyuv. Or MJPEG with no transcoding, just remux the input jpegs into an MJPEG. (-codec:video copy). – Peter Cordes Dec 07 '16 at 15:25
The -loop_output argument does not exist. – herrbischoff Jul 03 '20 at 08:55

score 24 · Answer 3 · edited Sep 02 '13 at 02:45

24

The convert's --delay option only applies to the next image on the command line. So convert -delay 10 * will only set the delay of the first frame to 0.1 second. The option need to be repeated:

convert $(for a in *; do printf -- "-delay 10 %s " $a; done; ) result.gif

For your sorting need, convert does not sort frames, the shell globing * does. If you know your frames are numbered from 0 to 700, you can just compute the numbers yourself:

convert $(for ((a=0; a<700; a++)); do printf -- "-delay 10 name%s.png " $a; done;) result.gif

edited Sep 02 '13 at 02:45

jasonwryan

73,126

answered Dec 02 '12 at 12:08

BatchyX

3,063

8

I do not experience this behavior with convert, for me convert -delay 1000 -loop 0 *.png animation.gif does add a 10s delay between each image. – Lode Nov 08 '14 at 18:52
1

You can also use version sort of the ls command. That is: convert -delay 1000 $(ls -v name*png) output.gif – erik Apr 05 '15 at 20:37

Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com · Answer 4 · 2021-10-02T19:55:16.427

ffmeg important GIF options + test data

To complement this answer:

wget -O opengl-rotating-triangle.zip https://github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/master/opengl-rotating-triangle.zip?raw=true
unzip opengl-rotating-triangle.zip
cd opengl-rotating-triangle
ffmpeg \
  -framerate 60 \
  -pattern_type glob \
  -i 'tmp.*.png' \
  -r 15 \
  -vf scale=512:-1 \
  out.gif \
;

The test data was generated with: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3191978/how-to-use-glut-opengl-to-render-to-a-file/14324292#14324292

The important ffmpeg options I wanted to highlight are:

-pattern_type glob: convenient way to select images
-framerate 60 and -r 15: assume 60 FPS on input images (ffmpeg cannot know otherwise since no FPS data in images as in video formats), pick one every 4 images so reduce size (4 == 60 / 15)
-vf scale=512:-1: set the width, scale height proportionally, usually to reduce size and save space

See also:

Video from images: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24961127/how-to-create-a-video-from-images-with-ffmpeg/37478183#37478183)
GIF from video: https://askubuntu.com/questions/648603/how-to-create-an-animated-gif-from-mp4-video-via-command-line)

Tested in Ubuntu 18.10, ffmpeg 4.0.2.

Thanks a lot, this was highly useful to me. – herrbischoff Jul 03 '20 at 08:54 — herrbischoff, Jul 03 '20 at 08:54

gregnotcraig · Answer 5 · 2011-11-07T08:42:03.643

8

Update:

Use convert for the png-to-gif, then use gifsicle for the animation. It's not a One App To Do It All solution, but scriptable, for sure.

GIMP can create animated gifs and provides control for timing/delay and repeat, etc

edited Nov 07 '11 at 08:42

answered Nov 05 '11 at 19:21

gregnotcraig

674

4

I know about the gimp but I don't know how to script it. Besides, the using the gimp to create animation is like killing a fly with a cannon – Yotam Nov 07 '11 at 07:58
1

That's a bad idea; the quality will be horrible, as each frame will be quantized separately. – Clément Jul 05 '16 at 13:27

score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Apr 18 '13 at 20:03

3

ImageMagick can generate a good quality gif animation. Check this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFusYizJ-bA

answered Apr 18 '13 at 20:03

xyz

31

8

Welcome to Unix & Linux! Generally we like answers on the site to be able to stand on their own - Links are great, but if that link ever breaks the answer should have enough information to still be helpful. Please consider editing your answer to include more detail. See the FAQ for more info. – slm Apr 18 '13 at 20:20
What a useful comment above.... – Luke Jul 10 '18 at 06:42
3

convert -delay 200 -loop 0 *.jpg output.gif – Luke Jul 10 '18 at 06:42
@Luke - out of all the chaos posted under this question your comment was most useful – cipricus Oct 26 '19 at 22:07
For me too, the solution by Luke made my day. – doctorate Jul 21 '23 at 09:22

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered May 07 '22 at 17:25

ffmpeg can do it all for you but it is really hard to get your head around it. I wrote a tiny script to do the job so I don't have to remember. It runs through the images twice: pass "a" to work out an optimal colour palette, then pass "b" to actually create the gif file using the created palette. Paste the following into a text file:

#!/bin/bash
ffmpeg -framerate 24 -start_number_range 999 -f image2 -i $1%3d.png -filter_complex "[0:v] split [a][b];[a] palettegen [p];[b][p] paletteuse" $1.gif

Save the file as "creategif", or something else to your taste, make it executable and put it in the same directory as your sequence of pngs

For a sequence foobar004.png, foobar005.png, foobar006.png...

open a command line and cd to the directory with everything in it then type

./creategif foobar

and it will create a file foobar.gif from the png's. You could add a few parameters to the script to make it a bit more flexible, but I find it easier to just hack the script if I want a different framerate or something. Many thanks to whoever it was on this forum that steered me in the right direction a few years back.

score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Oct 11 '22 at 18:04

1

In order to get the frames in numeric order (i.e. 1.png, 2.png) rather than alphabetical, do this:

files=$(ls | sort --version-sort); convert -delay 10 loop 0 $files animation.gif

answered Oct 11 '22 at 18:04

cjm2671

150

score -3 · Answer 9 · answered Sep 24 '18 at 17:23

-3

In regards to point 2

The version of ImageMagick "display" I have (ImageMagick 6.7.2-7 2017-01-12) ignores the frame rate set using the convert command to produce the animated gif. Try another program to view the animate gif like firefox.

answered Sep 24 '18 at 17:23

heartypanther

1

Creating a GIF animation from PNG files

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