I'm doing a banner for my friends' band, and I have to figure out how to reduce the file size of an animated .gif in imageready. Does anybody have any ideas/techniques?

Any help/suggestions is appreciated.

As far as I know GIF images doesn't have compression... So I don't have any idea.

Google is your best friend!
http://google.com/search?hl=en ... ted+.gif+&btnG=Search
Try looking there!

I've used this site b4, does the job of resizing a gif file without a separate app

http://www.gifworks.com/

Google didn't work when I tried it, and the .gif is 521 KB in file size =/ , so gifworks doesn't work.

If a Gif is too big in size, you just have to reduce the max allowed colors. Gifs have a max of 256 colors, and if you use that it is usually resulting in high quality. However if you have a gif that is set to 256 and only uses like 80, Imageready would export a gif with 80 colors set. But my guess is that you have full colors and/or it is just a really long animation. The more frames the bigger size too.

So first try and cut down the colors. If that does not help, try and reduce some frames, but it won't be as smooth. Also reducing the dimensions of the gif would affect it greatly (if it is a large image).

For example, look at these GIF files as samples. They are that Vykos avatar I made for him. He had to end up using the one of least colors and dimensions to have a low filesize of course

http://www.tweak.in/uploads/vykos_dance_150.gif (150 x 150 Full Color = 600kb)
http://www.tweak.in/uploads/vykos_dance_100.gif (100 x 100 Full Color = 268kb)
http://www.tweak.in/uploads/vykos_dance_60.gif (60 x 60 Full Color = 105kb)

So if you notice everything can affect the filesize of a GIF. And the one below here is the end result to 'optimizing' an animated gif to fit within a certain filesize.

http://www.tweak.in/uploads/vykos_dance_8col.gif (100 x 100 8 Colors = 58kb -- this is the only way to make Gifs smaller size)

When you export the GIF in ImageReady, it should have some options for choosing colors and such. It won't look pretty as a end result, but that is the sad part about GIFs

I reduced the dimensions, because I figured that would help alot, and it brought it from 512 kb to 288...I think that's the best it's getting. It's about a 10-15 second animation, full colors I believe. =/

10-15 second animation would be hard to get to low amounts. Unless it is like a 'cartoon' animation that does not use many colors. But for like images that motion captures or something, those can only be optimized by lowering the max allowed colors.

To be perfectly honest, if you can hold of Macromedia Flash, you would be better using it to make a flash movie clip which could then be saved as a .swf file, which typically has a smaller size than the equivalent .gif image.

Actually, thinking about it, if you have all the images as seperate frames and can rar them up and attach them to a post I'll make a .swf file for you...

I'm just going to keep it down to 250 kb. That's not THAT bad. And the reason I use imageready is because I have it, and I like photoshop lol.

Thanks for all yoiur help evreyone, and Tweak, I can't find an option =/