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
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

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