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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:

  1. I can't tell what the progress is.
  2. No matter what I try, the -delay flag doesn't change the frame rate of the gif animation.
  3. 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.
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[News] There is a massive overlap between Ubuntu Stackexchange and Unix Stackexchange. I tried to categorize some threads here. –  hhh Dec 30 '12 at 1:07

5 Answers 5

up vote 8 down vote accepted

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
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This instruction is out of date. –  Andy Jul 16 at 19:03
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 8 at 18:57

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

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The question mentions convert and some problems using it. Your answer doesn't address any of them. –  Mat Nov 6 '11 at 0:36
As of ImageMagick version 6.8.7-4 2013-11-02 Q16 this worked for me. –  Rudy Matela Nov 6 '13 at 17:11


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

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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 7 '11 at 7:58

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
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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 8 at 18:52

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

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