A guy on a forum told me my GIFs were way too big for 2001 and he was right

Back in 2001 I was making these huge animated GIFs for my Homestead page, like 500KB each, and some random dude named Rob called me out for hogging bandwidth on dial-up. He showed me how to cut frames and reduce colors in Jasc Animation Shop, which saved my page from loading for 10 minutes. Anyone else have a random stranger fix your terrible early web habits?

2 comments

2 Comments

anthony_lane5515d agoMost Upvoted

Man, I had a buddy on GeoCities back in 99 who emailed me a whole tutorial on reducing GIF file sizes because my spinning skull animation was like 800KB. I still remember that number because it was almost half a meg for one single image on 56k. He walked me through dithering and dropping the color palette down to like 16 colors. My page actually loaded after that. Those random helpers saved a lot of us from looking like total noobs.

leor3711d ago

Dropping the color palette down to like 16 colors" - that was a game changer for me too. I had this animated fire effect on my Angelfire site that was just a brick wall on dial-up. A random stranger from a web design IRC channel showed me how to use Photoshop's "Save for Web" feature and cut the colors in half. Also, I learned the hard way that looping animations eat up way more space than single-pass ones. Your buddy was smart to walk you through dithering, @anthony_lane55, most people skipped that step and ended up with weird blocky artifacts everywhere.