My animated GIFs are way bigger than they should be. What am I doing wrong...?

megatabbers

New member
Jul 21, 2009
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Boston, MA
Gentlemen,

I have some rudimentary Photoshop skills. I make my own (ugly) banners which usually consist of some text, a small pic, and an animated link; 2 frames. However, my file sizes are too large. Even at 40K they still look like crap.

The banners I see online are like 15K (again, text and pic and 2 frames) and they look crystal clear. Can someone lend a hand with the settings?

Thanks.
 


OK, played around with it some. Turns out it's the added images that are causing the file size to get too big.

Should I be processing these stock photos somewhat into before pasting them into the banner?
 
Optimize when import assets into Photoshop or other editors (I prefer Fireworks for animated gifs) not the moment you export, don't use transparency, copy the layers and flatten (rasterize) this ones keeping the source ones locked and hidden for future use. Try to use always interpolation and not frame-by-frame editing.
 
Remember a gif is only 256 colors so having an image with millions of colors really wont benefit and only make your image way heavier than it should.

As suggested convert photos you want in the banner to indexed color before.