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Count Frames in an Animated GIF

By David Walsh on June 26, 2018

The animated GIF always makes me chuckle; on one hand they seem like a relic of the "old web", on the other hand they aren't going anywhere and their meme-like presence seem to only make them more popular. If you browse through my media blog posts archives, you'll notice that I've written a ton about animated GIFs, including how to tell if a gif is animated, how to get a screenshot of the first frame, converting GIF to WEBP, and more.

My curiosity recently brought me to asking how to detect how many frames were present in an animated GIF; as expected, ImageMagick had the answer:

identify -format "%n\n" bitcoin.gif | head -n 1
>> 101

What is this calculation useful for? I suppose if you have a media management site you could show each frame to a user so they could choose a poster when converting to video. In any event, I was curious and simply had to find out!

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Count Frames in an Animated GIF

Recent Features

Create a CSS Flipping Animation

Animating CSS3 Transforms with MooTools Fx

Incredible Demos

Upload Photos to Flickr with PHP

JavaScript Canvas Image Conversion

Discussion