Animated GIFs

Scrimage supports reading and writing animated GIFs.

Reading

We read an instance of an AnimatedGif by using the AnimatedGifReader.read method, passing in an ImageSource. The image source can be constructed from files, bytes, input streams and so on.

Once we have the animated gif object, we can inspect that to retrieve an ImmutableImage per frame, the total number of frames, delay per frame and so on.

Java

AnimatedGif gif = AnimatedGifReader.read(ImageSource.of(...));
ImmutableImage firstFrame = gif.getFrame(0);
ImmutableImage lastFrame = gif.getFrame(gif.getFrameCount() - 1);

Kotlin

val gif = AnimatedGifReader.read(ImageSource.of(...))
val firstFrame = gif.frames().first()
val lastFrame = gif.frames().last()

Scala

val gif = AnimatedGifReader.read(ImageSource.of(...))
val firstFrame = gif.frames.head
val lastFrame = gif.frames.last

Writing

Using the StreamingGifWriter class, first we create an instance of the writer, specifying the frame delay (delay between images) and if we should loop. Then we open a stream, specifying either an output path or an output stream, and the AWT image type we want the images to be created with.

Java

StreamingGifWriter writer = new StreamingGifWriter(Duration.ofSeconds(2), true);
GifStream gif = writer.prepareStream("/path/to/gif.gif", BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);

Kotlin

val writer = StreamingGifWriter(Duration.ofSeconds(2), true)
val gif = writer.prepareStream("/path/to/gif.gif", BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB)

Scala

val writer = new StreamingGifWriter(Duration.ofSeconds(2), true)
val gif = writer.prepareStream("/path/to/gif.gif", BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB)

Next we can add as many images as we want, each an instance of an ImmutableImage. Eg,

gif.writeFrame(image0);
gif.writeFrame(image1);
gif.writeFrame(imageN);

Finally, we close the stream by invoking finish, and the data is finalized to the output stream or path.

gif.finish();

Note

Browsers have a minimum frame delay. If you try to set the frame delay lower than the minimum for that browser, the browser will use the default frame delay. The default frame delay is not equal to the minimum. Chrome and Firefox have a minimum frame delay of 0.2 seconds and IE and Safari 0.6 seconds.