Count Frames in an Animated GIF

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Implementing Basic and Fancy Show/Hide in MooTools 1.2

    One of the great parts of MooTools is that the library itself allows for maximum flexibility within its provided classes. You can see evidence of this in the "Class" class' implement method. Using the implement method, you can add your own methods to...

  • By
    Web Notifications API

    Every UI framework has the same set of widgets which have become almost essential to modern sites: modals, tooltips, button varieties, and notifications.  One problem I find is each site having their own widget colors, styles, and more -- users don't get a consistent experience.  Apparently the...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!