Animated GIFs as avatars

[UmbraWitchJeanne]

I'm trying to change my avatar to an animated GIF, but when I do, it appears as a still image.

I know this forum supports animated GIFs, since ExtremeDude2 has an animated Sonic sprite as his avatar, so what exactly am I doing wrong?

(the image is 100px in width and 48.4 KB in size, by the way)

[MayImilae]

I'm trying to change my avatar to an animated GIF, but when I do, it appears as a still image.

We can't know what you are doing wrong unless you tell us what you are doing! How exactly are you trying to change to an animated gif avatar?

[UmbraWitchJeanne]

I'm using the "upload from computer" method.

[Apache Thunder]

Wasn't aware this site supported that. I just now uploaded one. It worked fine for me as far as I can see. I did it the same way you did. Used the upload feature instead of the gravitar/offsite option.

Perhaps your avatar GIF is broken somehow. Make sure it's 100x100 or smaller and file size doesn't exceed 50KB. It may allow you to use GIFs larger then 100x100, but then it will auto-resize them and this may be why yours doesn't animate anymore. So you can try exporting it at exactly 100x100 frame size to avoid it's resize feature breaking things.

Also check that it it actually contains animation frames. If you exported it incorrectly, you may end up with a GIF with only one frame. Perhaps the frame delays being too low might also cause problems. If you want, you can PM me your GIF so I can take a look at it and test it with the site. I'm betting there's just something wrong with how it's exported/frame timings.

EDIT: Also, I viewed your avatar separately in my browser and it's currently a PNG file and not a GIF file. Unless you went back to the PNG version when you found your GIF one wasn't working? (I did redownload mine off the site and it's a GIF like it's suppose to be, so the file format changing should not be happening unless it's got something to do with the auto-resize feature)

[UmbraWitchJeanne]

It may allow you to use GIFs larger then 100x100, but then it will auto-resize them and this may be why yours doesn't animate anymore. So you can try exporting it at exactly 100x100 frame size to avoid it's resize feature breaking things.

Ah-HA, that was the problem all along! Shrinking it to 86x100 makes it work perfectly now!

Thank you!

[Apache Thunder]

No problem. Good to see you got it fixed. Yeah I figured the auto resize feature may be killing GIFs due to format conversion.

Had to resize my sig image too since the original was too big to fit (part of the bottom was cut off). Must have been a change to the forum layout as I don't recall that being an issue a year or two ago when I originally made that GIF.