APNG Campaign
February 18th, 2008
Since we launched this almost a month ago we have been inundated with feedback, mostly good 
. We have also been receiving close to 4000 visits a day, seems there is definitely in interest in this technology, for good or bad!
A few thoughts have come to my mind, perhaps we need to consider campaigning apng’s within the open source community as well as web designers/developers. It would be interesting to see if this technology will be adapted by software like Gimp and Inkscape. Imagine a built in apng tool that would allow to optimize, sequence, and assemble apng’s.
I would also like to see how creative we can be with apng’s without over doing it, which seems to be the biggest question on peoples minds. I think if we can keep file sizes down and implement apng’s in a useful way, like navigation, simple ads, interface design, logos, etc., then perhaps there is a chance that other will begin to adopt and take advantage of this technology.
Let’s face it, png’s are better than gif ‘s, so why are we sitting on the fence?
So, for those apng enthusiasts out there, let’s spread the word and see what happens.
-Brendan
March 6th, 2008 at 7:17 am
‘Campaign’ not ‘Campaing’
March 6th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Great idea ! Keep up the good work
–
PS. is there any plugin for PS to assemble APNG’s ?
March 7th, 2008 at 10:33 am
A great site for animated png resources.
March 7th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Ancient: There is no plugin yet!!! we are also hoping they will implemnt a plugin for GIMP…
Stevpan: Thanks!
March 9th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
I just finished an applet for assembling still images into animated png, and posted it on my blog. Hope you will like it. 2 sample pngs (fireworks) were provided. Most types of still images are supported. Fade in/out and image feathering were implemented.
image2apng
http://slideplay.blogspot.com/2008/03/free-online-service-image2apng.html
It’s based on chris.nokleberg’s javapng project on google code.
March 9th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Hi! Brendan:
As I could not find your email address, I have to ask some questions here.
Where is the discussion forum of APNG developing? If 2 frames in APNG are identical, is it possible to keep only 1 frame to reduce the filesize? If possible, how to do it?
Sorry for so many questions.
March 10th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
If the identical frames follow one after another in the sequence, it make sense to keep only the first, but increase the delay_num.
Otherwise it’s not possible. According to specs, each `fdAT` chunk should have a unique sequence number.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Thanks a lot, Max.
The problem is that I wish to get an efficient way for fade-in/out effects between 2 images. Therefore, there are only difference in alpha value between 2 frames.
A lot of people in local forums like to use gif to post simple slideshow animations (e.g. photo story). It’s easier than posting video clips on forums, and I wish to use use apng to get better fade in/out effects.
March 11th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Well, alpha is a part of the frame, so if alpha is different, then the frame is different.
Not sure if the fade-in is possible, but you can make a fade-out using PNG_BLEND_OP_OVER and solid-color frames.
Check out the example. Overhead here is about 10%, so it’s pretty efficient.
http://newstop.googlepages.com/apng7
March 18th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
recently i have switched IE to FF most recent version, but had to backtrack into FF3.o3b for support w/ png animation–I’m pretty impressed with the overall quality but least surprised about support.
OverALL coolsite.
April 3rd, 2008 at 5:13 pm
“png’s are better than gif ’s, so why are we sitting on the fence?” I’m sitting on the fence because I don’t know how to fall back to an animated GIF if the browser doesn’t do APNG. I suppose I could hide the GIF behind a transparent fallback PNG, but then the APNG animation couldn’t be translucent. I could go by useragent string, but we all know that’s bad. Is there an elegant way to check for browser support?
May 24th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Test because I can not post
May 24th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
A little question: APNG can’t change any PNG specification, right? So no new compression algorithm can be added?
I ask this because actually GIF format does a better compression for ‘real’ images (where PNG is better with screenshots et similia). Do you think LZW, LZMA or some other algorithm can’t be supported?
(PS: I can’t post if I use the quotes)
May 25th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
GIF images are looking rather crappy, not sure if its a good idea to copy anything from gifs.
And you can’t use quotes, cause this site is valnurable to SQL Injection.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I’m proposing to add another lossless compression algorithm, it can’t affect image quality.
LZMA seems to me a good and strong algorithm:
http://www.7-zip.org/sdk.html
(PS: I can’t post before because I tried to write a Wikipedia link. Probably an anti-spam feature).
June 17th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
This is a cool file type but I wonder when will the APNG Editor ( without using Firefox) be out? I cannot edit APNG files…
June 20th, 2008 at 10:42 am
I really like the idea of an animated PNG, lets hope this takes hold and we can implement this web wide!
I think we have to get people to update there browsers from ie4 & 5 to the new Firefox 3, that might take some time…
October 6th, 2008 at 4:33 am
Frosty update ie4&5? Who is still using ie4&5? Even win2k can use ie6.
My main question is WHY? Do we need another image format?
But hey I am down for ads and bs banners that only say my “browser doesn’t support” them OH YA!
Animate this one spread_ff.png
Fantastic idea spam only for haters!
December 1st, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Why do we need APNG? Because we need animations-formats. GIFs can only handle 256 colors – that’s way too less. And not everyone wants to use Flash (propretary and much too difficult for a simple animation) or animated SVGs.
I support APNG, and hope it will be as widely accepted as PNG.
January 1st, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Everyone probably knows this by now but some questions here touched it. The easiest wat to get to making apngs is to make png files in the gimp then stitch them together with apng edit for firefox.
March 1st, 2009 at 8:50 pm
“The easiest wat to get to making apngs is to make png files in the gimp then stitch them together with apng edit for firefox.”
I used GIMP (GAP) to make an animation and then converted it into a xcf file with each frame a new image. But after getting that far I spent a long time looking for a way to export each layer as it’s own image but found out that this is impossible (?). I ended up manually changing the visibility each layer and saving them individually, I don’t plan on making any more animated images any time soon.
April 9th, 2009 at 5:28 am
@Vaer:
You can use the “Split Image into Frames” function after you have an image containing all of your frames, and then just set the filetype to .png. After that, you will end up with each frame saved as a png file.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Its a great idea, keep it working
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:41 am
Hi
Everyone probably knows this by now but some questions here touched it. The easiest wat to get to making apngs is to make png files in the gimp then stitch them together with apng edit for firefox.
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:42 am
Hello
GIF images are looking rather crappy, not sure if its a good idea to copy anything from gifs.
And you can’t use quotes, cause this site is valnurable to SQL Injection.
August 23rd, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Anything for optimizing animations? Preferably a script.
August 24th, 2009 at 1:39 am
VDubAPNGMod is good for lossless APNG optimizations.
APNG Anime Maker can do lossy optimizations.
Also that new PUNYPNG online service promises to add APNG support soon (not yet)
October 15th, 2009 at 5:20 am
I sincerely hope IE, Safari, and Chrome eventually implement APNG. Then I could actually make sites like http://www.kizzume.com/testing4.html — right now I’m still having to convert this concept to gif, which hasn’t been fun.
November 17th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Hi
Everyone probably knows this by now but some questions here touched it.
January 30th, 2010 at 4:45 am
Apperantly, Sven Neumann, part of the Dev team, thinks APNG is BS. Whether he speaks for his own beliefs or for the GIMP dev community at large, There will be no APNG support for GIMP any time in the near future. He sites ‘patched libraries’ as one reason for this. That’s BS thinking in it’s own right. Open Source software has been patched software since day 1. Unless Sven thinks that GIMP should not be used on GNU/Linux OSes, and wants to keep it solely for Windows, his entire mindset is flawed. But that’s neither here nor there. He suggests that someone outside GIMP development write a plugin if we want apng support.
I for one do not know how to write plugins. I wouldn’t know where to start. I do, however know how to use GIMP. But if Sven speaks for the entire GIMP Dev team, perhaps I will find another piece of software to use instead.
On Monday, June 25, 2007, Sven replied to Andrew Smith concerning this. The following is his reply and can be found at the mail archives at http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/lists/gimp-developer/2007-June/018093.html
For your conveince, the message is below. As of January 30, 2010, There still is no Animated PNG support in GIMP, and MNG support is completely gone, abandoned. (Except maybe Konqueror) I am sure in the 2 and a half years since writing that reply, the APNG team has come up with a stable library. I can’t see why the GIMP Dev team has to spend so much time and effort redesigning every new point release’ interface instead of spending some time to go over the library and incorperate APNG support into GIMP. I have lost a LOT of confidence in the GIMP team over the last year, and I do believe this is going to push me over the edge to find something else.
Hi,
On Mon, 2007-06-25 at 10:43 -0400, Andrew Smith wrote:
> I was wondering whether there is any interest in having The Gimp support
> the APNG format? And if so, whether any of the Gimp developers would be
> willing to write it?
In my opinion APNG is the wrong approach and it is very unfortunate that
the Firefox developers seems to think that APNG supprt is more important
than MNG support.
But GIMP is modular and nothing keeps you or anyone else from writing a
plug-in that adds APNG support to GIMP. Since we aren’t going to include
or depend on a patched version of libpng, such a plug-in would have to
be distributed separately.
Sven
January 30th, 2010 at 4:46 am
Sven Neumann is part of the GIMP dev team, sorry for any confusion the first line of my previous comment might have caused.