Sign your GIFs!

Latest Update 1.2 (12/04/2007)


Okey dokey peeps, Ah have been a hacking!

Following livius's Firefox and Emote Rips and Ffox Emotes, now with Artist Submissions! journals and the comments that they generated, I had a quick look at how many of our GIFs were actually signed.  Out of about 400 I checked only 2 had a comment that named the author.

A bit more digging revealed that most of the software we use to create GIFs will by default strip out any comments as part of an "optimisation" process (reducing the file size by a few dozen bytes, Whoo! ). Some software does not seem to support comments at all (I'm looking at you, Fireworks ).

Yet more poking about on t'internet revealed that the GIF format is reasonably simple, so a bit of keyboard bashing has resulted in GIF Comment (Windows only). This will let you view and add comments to GIF files, so you can sign your stuff before uploading it. For example :

You can download the application from www.humpy.demon.co.uk/gifcom/g….  I did look into building an installation wrapper but that would have increased the download from  50Kb to 3Mb.  The zip contains the executable, a help file and an example GIF.  Just extract them and run the exe.

Let me know here if you find any problems or if you have any suggestions.

Gotta go work now



*************** Updates ***************
You can download the latest version here.

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1.2.0 (12/04/2007) More ideas from BoffinBrain. Options have been added to let you choose :
- how the safe copies are handled
- whether folders are opened with the comments expanded or closed

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1.1.0 (13/03/2007) Updated with a couple of suggestions from BoffinBrain -  multiline comments and an HTTP header on the deviantArt url.

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Already on version 1.0.2 : A couple of bugs were found that could stop the program from starting up, plus the comment added to the GIF used "@" instead of "©".
Download the new zip from the same location and overwrite your existing copy.

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See mah horns!