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Editing GIFS and Creating 88x31 Buttons

August 18, 2024

micro   gifs   gimp

Lately I have been learning how to edit GIFS and it is painstaking difficult to remove a background from a GIF without using an AI tool, especially when the image has over 70 frames. There is likely an easier way to edit GIFs but I had to manually edit over 50 frames, erasing the clouds from a GIF using the eraser tool frame by frame which took some time to finish.

Original:

Result:

However, if you are not editing a GIF but rather trying to incorporate the GIF into your 88x31 buttons, it turns out to be quite simple. Following the instructions from a video on Youtube, I managed to create a few simple 88x31 buttons that have features cats, coffee, and the two programs I am or finished studying (i.e. doing a 2nd degree):

To resize the gifs, I used ezgif resize tool to set the height to be 31px since I didn’t know how to resize GIFs on GIMP as it would open a bunch of layers. I guess I could have used ffmpeg but using an online tool is just more convenient and easier. I do wonder if there are other standard anti-pixel button sizes aside from 80x15 pixels because a height of 31 pixels is quite limiting. It’s amazing what the community has been able to do with such limiting number of pixels.

For instance, the Bash button I have made has the subtitle “THE BOURNE-AGAIN SHELL” which is very hard to make out. I am assuming the standard practice is to render the button as a GIF and display the text on the next frame. That way users would be able to see the full-text.