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Rotareti
Asked: 2017-01-12 15:59:25 +0800 CST

Cut duration of animated gif

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I have an animated gif and I'd like to cut off the last 5 seconds. Does anyone know how to do that in Linux/Ubuntu?

gif

2 Answers

  1. There are multiple ways to do this.

    Option 1: Use a command line tool called gifsicle. It's available in default Ubuntu/Debian repositories.

    It's fast and won't affect the quality, buy it only accepts frame numbers, not time, so if you need to cut exact time, you should figure out the frame number yourself. You can view the total number of frames and delay times between each frame with this command:

    gifsicle --info YOURFILE.gif

    Then you can divide the time you want to cut with the frame delay and it will give you the number of frames in this time, so you can figure out start frame and end frame.

    Replace XXXX with the frame where you want your GIF to start, and YYYY with frame where you want your GIF to end.

    gifsicle YOURFILE.gif '#XXXX-YYYYY' -O3 > cut.gif

    Option 2: Using FFMPEG. It's also available in apt.

    FFMPEG accepts time directly, so it's very straightforward, but it may worsen the quality of output gif and increase file size in some cases.

    ffmpeg -i YOURFILE.gif -ss 00:00:04 -t 00:00:08 -async 1 cut.gif

    Option 3: if you're ok with online tools and your GIF does not exceed 20MB, this online tool can cut GIFs by frame number or by time and won't affect the quality.

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  2. Here's one more. Using ImageMagick, the command:

     magick Long.gif[0-100] Short.gif

    takes the first 100 frames of Long.gif and saves them as Short.gif

    You can see how many frames you're starting with using:

    magick identify Long.gif

    The last line of the output will show the number of frames in square brackets, for example:

    Long.gif[829] GIF 64x64 64x64+0+0 8-bit sRGB 256c 1.86076MiB 0.031u 0:00.034

    which indicates that Long.gif has 830 frames.

    Note that much legacy documentation of ImageMagick refers to the identify (now magick identify) and convert (now magick) commands, which could be what you need depending how recent your version is.

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