Basic Animated Gif Editing

[Script]

I realise Affinity Photo doesn't allow animated GIF editing currently (only the first frame is loaded), and i read in the help forum it isn't planned. However, I would love it if:

1) When an animated gif is loaded, each frame is loaded into a timeline, where you can set the time delay for each frame.

2) Each frame is on its own layer for editing

3) The edited gif could then be exported as an animated gif.

 

It is one of the only major features I miss from Photoshop, and yep, I am aware you try to avoid direct comparisons, and I understand why.

So far, the program is great though! Thanks.

[John Rostron]

Are you referring to animated gifs rather than basic gifs?

John

[Alfred]

1 minute ago, John Rostron said:

Are you referring to animated gifs rather than basic gifs?

Given that static GIFs don’t contain frames, I think the OP must be referring to animated GIFs.

[John Rostron]

1 hour ago, αℓƒяє∂ said:

Given that static GIFs don’t contain frames, I think the OP must be referring to animated GIFs.

I asked the question because there seems to be an assumption by many on this forum that 'gifs' only came as animated and seem oblivious of the basic gif which is still going.

John

[Wosven]

But for this AP/AD should manage color palettes and the few tests I did with PNGs' palettes wasn't interesting (I didn't test working with the pixel brush, and the antialiasing was messing the palette's colors). 

For now, I would keep on with Gimp that can manage GIFs, palettes, import series of images in order if they are called something_01, something_02...

[Script]

5 hours ago, John Rostron said:

Are you referring to animated gifs rather than basic gifs?

John

Sorry yes. I missed the most crucial part of my request, but hopefully the developers, like yourself, can infer that!

I edted the original post.

Thanks.

[Attinity]

+1 for this feature request

neet it

[DJ_Jaybee]

+1 for animated gif / frames feature... if included then this software pretty much caters for everything we use fireworks for.

[PNTX]

+1 Would be a welcomed feature. I occasionally edit GIFs, so this is another situation where I have to rely on my parallel Photoshop CS6 installation.

[Seconto]

+1 Yes, I need this too.

I only just purchased Affinity Photo yesterday (after reading many reviews), and was very disappointed to find this feature missing. There are other features I would argue are not basic and which are surprisingly included, so not having this (which to me seems a basic feature) was a big disappointment.

[Medical Officer Bones]

Workaround options are:

• Krita
• OpenToonz

Both export to Animated Gifs through FFmpeg (in both applications the user must point to the FFmpeg executable before exporting to Animated Gif is possible). Import your assets from Affinity into either one to begin animating. Both are open source and free.

OpenToonz also allows for very easy automatic tweening between positions, scaling, rotating, and so on, and, unlike Krita, also imports gif animations for editing. Although OpenToonz might seem overkill for animated gifs, I discovered it handles these quite well.

[ChekTek]

+ 1 This would definitely be a nice feature.

Thanks for the workarounds.

[Trevor Reid]

Agree this is a surprising feature to omit for such advanced and well developed software. As a legacy Fireworks user I moved to AP because of Firework's death on Big Sur, and this is the one feature that would make the transition complete. BTW everything else about AP is far superior to Fireworks, it's what Fireworks could have looked like in the 2020's if Adobe had not been foolish enough to end development and support, except that the interface is also so much better than Adobe's over-wrought UI.

Edited August 7, 2021 by Trevor Reid

[dcr]

I know this is an old thread, but I'm going to +1 this too.  I've used Fireworks since version 1 when it was still a Macromedia product.  A lot of things it can do are doable in other applications, but the animated GIF feature is one that is sorely missed.  Being able to have multiple frames each with their own layers is a big help.  A lot of the shapes and whatnot used in Fireworks are vector so if you need to go back later and resize larger, it's easy and you don't lose resolution.  And, finally, being able to set how long each individual frame will display before going to the next one is very nice as is being able to define whether it plays once or in a continuous loop.  All those controls are useful.  And, being able to do all that within one program without having to do the frames in one program and marry them together in another and whatnot is very convenient.

[fde101]

If you think about it, each "frame" of animation is basically a page in a multi-page document, which has the pages flipped automatically every X amount of time.

As Serif seems intent on keeping support for adding multiple pages limited to Publisher at the moment, this feature might actually work better in the context of Publisher, by adding a checkbox when exporting a GIF causing each page to be treated as a separate frame of an animation (along with an option to specify the frame rate for playback).  You would create a document with the required number of pages, then could switch to the Photo persona (assuming you also own Photo) to use the relevant tools to do the editing of the individual frames...

Motion JPEG could then be handled in the same manner.

[Trevor Reid]

That's a good starting point, to manage it within the Affinity suite of apps, rather than jumping to another app or online service.

Next step from this would be to develop this workflow into an actual feature in Affinity Photo so that we can create/edit/export animated GIFs right from that app.

Thanks for the post.

[Lark]

+1 for animated gifs

I actually use photoshop more for making gifs than I do editing photos. Not having the ability to make gifs makes me less likely to buy the software after my trial is over. I just want the ability to export my layers into an animated gif.