Applications that work with APNGs
July 3rd, 2008
Just thought this list would be use or interest to some of you.
- Mozilla Firefox 3.0 (and other Gecko-based products) and later
- Opera 9.5 and later
- XnView, graphic and photo viewer, converter, organizer
- KSquirrel, an image viewer for Linux
- Imagine, Image & Animation Viewer for Windows
- gif2apng command-line converter
- apngasm command-line apng assembler
- apngdis command-line apng disassembler
- VirtualDub APNG Mod with APNG/MNG support
- Justin Dolske’s APNG Edit 1.5, a Firefox add-on
- Animat, a Firefox add-on
- APNG Anime Maker
- GIF Movie Gear
- Animated PNG Writer for ImageJ
- jtvmaker, Maple slideshow builder
- GifToAPNG Java Converter
- Holger’s SVG2PNG
- Reto Hoehener’s japng
- Latest online APNG assembler 2.0
July 13th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
I am crafting an extension which uses an animation as an activity indicator — until now, a gif animation, with expected gif antialias bleeding. I’d like to change it to use an apng for mozillas which do support that, but stick to the gif for all prior (or later, should there be build flags to turn off the apng support). What is a good way of testing for apng support from the xpi (so I can set an “apng” class name on the xul button I want to augment in modern browsers)?
I want the xpi to stay functional in firefox, flock and other platform siblings, so I’m hoping to be able to detect the feature rather than kludging up something from browser version numbers.
July 20th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
tga2apng can be used to make small, optimized animations:
http://newstop.googlepages.com/tga2apng
August 25th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
I have tried, and failed, to get the animated image to work using my Sony Ericsson mobile browser NetFront. Which is a shame.
November 29th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
PatchAnim creates APNG color blends based on bezier patches.
November 29th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Sorry, thats
http://patchanim.sf.net
March 7th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Is there any way to get APNG images in windows explorer to show animated in details and filmstrip?
May 10th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
VirtualDub APNG Mod:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdubapngmod/
June 17th, 2009 at 4:53 am
APNG Anime Maker:
http://sites.google.com/site/cphktool/
October 13th, 2009 at 2:28 am
APNG Assembler 2.0
http://littlesvr.ca/apng/assembler-2.0/assembler2.php
October 15th, 2009 at 6:49 am
gif2apng, my command-line converter:
http://gif2apng.sf.net/
January 11th, 2010 at 4:23 pm
I found this while googling “animated png”. I don’t know if this is old news or not, but it’s an online assembler unlike the one on this site. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s got a lot more options than APNG Assembler 2.0, so I assume it’s pretty good.
Notice that the only difference in the site address is at the end, “.net instead of “.com”.
I’m hoping that that site will have better samples in the future.
January 11th, 2010 at 4:24 pm
My bad. I thought the website text field would show the hyperlink. I’m new here.
http://animatedpng.net/
January 13th, 2010 at 6:35 am
Yeah, nice site and gallery. I especially like it’s fancy logo:
http://animatedpngs.com/.lcl/hotlinkable/browsertest.png
But it will not optimize your animations the way APNG Assembler 2.0 does.
January 13th, 2010 at 10:07 pm
It would be nice if the two assemblers combined to be the best of both worlds, options galore + leading-edge optimization. The one on .net needs to be a little less cluttered though.
“I especially like it’s fancy logo”
It’s alright, but it could look better. Maybe I’ll make one in my spare time.
January 14th, 2010 at 3:00 am
They are designed for different tasks, APNG Assembler 2.0 is for people who prepared image sequence, full frames. Then assembler can be used to optimize it by saving only difference between frames, not the full frames.
Other people would need some fancy effect like that sliding highlighting on their logo – it’s stored separately as simple gradient, and then blended over the background. Then indeed, you would need nice gui and “options galore” to implement that trick.
January 14th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
If you do imageready/photoshop/other similiar appplications plugins the format will be more used and spread rapidly
January 15th, 2010 at 5:32 am
Yes. Photoshop plugin is very much needed.
Good news is that I’m working on it.
January 20th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Only recently I found out how to make apng creation a snap. Many people who don’t know Photoshop inside and out may find these steps very useful.
Make sure the animation you’ve created in Photoshop won’t create a very large PNG, because japng-editor.jar doesn’t like working with a bunch of large-file PNGs simultaneously.
Go to File > Export > Render Video…
Make sure you have an empty folder where you can save 100 or less PNGs (100 frames seem to be the limit of japng-editor.jar), then select it in Select Folder…
Instead of Quicktime Export, select Image Sequence: [ PNG ]
Now click Render.
(You should have the same number of frames in the folder as what you had in Photoshop, unless in Photoshop you had varying frame delays. If you had uniform frame delays, and yet you didn’t end up with the same number of PNGs saved in the folder, then the frame rate you had selected in the Render Video window wasn’t correctly matched.)
Now open up japng-editor.jar, click Load frames or animation… and open all of the PNGs in one selection.
(Photoshop already numbered each file in sequence for you, so there’s no pain-staking “stitching” required.)
Set the same frame delays that were in Photoshop or do whatever else you’ve had in mind. Click Save animation… and viola! Your animated png was a breeze to make.
The next time you go through these steps in the Render Video window, you will see that most of what you had selected before is still the same, so you could skip selecting the same settings again.
This will be the easiest process to follow for just about any Photoshop animation until an APNG plugin is made.
January 21st, 2010 at 7:26 am
I have already implemented that part, so if you want to beta-test my experimental “export to apng” plugin, drop a line at
newstop
gmail
January 23rd, 2010 at 6:28 pm
Not a single one of these applications is capable of saving an animated PNG in a 256 bit colour depth format. If fact, most will explicitly save their output in 32 bbp colour depth only.
January 24th, 2010 at 9:26 am
Most of them, but not all.
gif2apng.sf.net will keep the gif palette.
APNG assembler 2.0 also creates paletted APNGs from paletted PNG files.
But I hear what you’re saying – many of the developers prefer to take the lazy approach, so their apps would just save the full frames at 32 bpp, with no attempt to optimization. That does a disservice to the whole apng development, as huge filesizes could scare new users.
APNG format allows you to store only difference between frames (just like gif), and I would strongly advise developers to use that feature…
February 17th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
Here is a modification of TweakPNG, which supports the APNG chunks and the iTXT chunk:
http://www.geocities.jp/pngapng/tweakapng/
February 18th, 2010 at 6:19 am
Original TweakPNG supports them too.
But I see that this mod allows to *edit* them. Could be useful, to change frame delays in existing apng, for example.
Too bad you can’t use internal viewer to preview animations.
February 18th, 2010 at 7:26 am
Ah! My own copy of original TweakPNG is version 1.2.1.
I wasn’t aware that 1.3.0 and newer versions have been released, sorry.
February 22nd, 2010 at 6:02 am
Don’t be sorry, editing existing apng chunks is a very useful feature. But maybe you could update the latest TweakPNG, and then post the result on sourceforge. That way more people will know about it.