How to Reverse an Animated GIF

By  on  

Modifying visual media via code has always been a fascination of mine. Probably because I'm not a designer and I tend to stick to what I'm good at. One visual effect I love is seeing video reversed -- it provides a sometimes hilarious perspective on a given event.

Take this reversed water effect for example:

To reverse an animated GIF or video, you can use the ImageMagick library:

convert water-forward.gif -coalesce -reverse -quiet -layers OptimizePlus  -loop 0 water-reversed.gif

If you're interested in media engineering, check out my previous ImageMagick tutorials. These awesome media libraries are as close to an artist I will ever get!

Recent Features

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    PHP IMDB Scraper

    It's been quite a while since I've written a PHP grabber and the itch finally got to me. This time the victim is the International Movie Database, otherwise known as IMDB. IMDB has info on every movie ever made (or so it seems). Their...

  • By
    MooTools ContextMenu Plugin

    ContextMenu is a highly customizable, compact context menu script written with CSS, XHTML, and the MooTools JavaScript framework. ContextMenu allows you to offer stylish, functional context menus on your website. The XHTML Menu Use a list of menu items with one link per item. The...

Discussion

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