Requested better GIF showing

[zed]

I think it would be very useful to implement a feature to "skip to next frame" in GIF's, after stopping animation (G)
At this moment, it's impossible to see a GIF image, frame by frame.

Check for example this image:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Pentagon_construct.gif

If you save frames as individual images (Options -> Extract all frames..), you can't see the animation by by browsing those individual images, since they have different sizes.

[ChuckE]

To cast a little water on your fire, an animated GIF may or may not have full frames of new data in the very next frame. There is nothing that dictates that the next frame has to be a complete new re-draw. It could just as easily be just a small portion of the old frame now updated. That is, just only the new pixels that have changed are now in this next frame.

Doing animations this way provides for a faster update in an animation. When only the pixels that are changing, from one to the next, are provided.

So, while it might be conceptually easy to think of as an whole new frame, in reality, only the new, changing pixels are really in the next frame. That is why frame to frame, in an animated GIF, the frame sizes will differ.

A programmer could re-constitute a whole new frame out of the new partial data and the past frame, but that is not what currently Irfan does in his viewer, IrfanView. Sorry.

[zed]

Of course, the GIF file does not contain full frames. But IrfanView is drawing every frame. After drawing every frame, it can save them. At least IrfanView can read the video memory. If the frame is on the screen, then obviously it can be read by IrfanView, like any screen capture program can read the frames.