how to create an animated gif in .net

Question

Hi,

Does anyone know how to create an animated gif using c#? Ideally I would have some control over the color reduction used.

Is using imagemagick (as an external started process) the best choice?

thanks!

Answer 1

Whether or not calling imagemagick is the best choice is kind of hard to awnser without knowing the quality parameters that are important. Some other options would be:

• Rick van den Bosch's code
• NGif article on codeplex

these have the advantage that you don't have a dependency on a third partly library which might or might not be available on all systems executing your code.

This article at MS Support explains how to save a gif with a custom color table (this does require full trust). A animated gif is just a set of gifs for each image with some additional information in the header. So combining these two articles should get you what you need.

Answer 2

Here are links to two tutorials, one includes a nice little encoder:

http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/rick/archive/2005/05/10/3830.aspx

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/GDI-plus/NGif.aspx

hope this helps