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

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

  • By
    5 HTML5 APIs You Didn&#8217;t Know Existed

    When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It."  Can you blame us though?  We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Using MooTools For Opacity

    Although it's possible to achieve opacity using CSS, the hacks involved aren't pretty. If you're using the MooTools JavaScript library, opacity is as easy as using an element's "set" method. The following MooTools snippet takes every image with the "opacity" class and sets...

  • By
    Upload Photos to Flickr with PHP

    I have a bit of an obsession with uploading photos to different services thanks to Instagram. Instagram's iPhone app allows me to take photos and quickly filter them; once photo tinkering is complete, I can upload the photo to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and...

Discussion

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