gif animation stops mid animation

[JonathanArias]

Hello, I made a simplete scrolling animation gif on photoshop:

 It plays fine on photoshop, however, it does not play all the way, It stop before making it all the way down"

It s plays fine on photoshop timeline, in the export for web dialiog it stops here:

[Aleke]

Hi @JonathanArias! Thanks so much for reaching out.

Could you share a few more details so I can better understand what’s going on? What version of Photoshop are you using? What does the last frame of your animation look like? And how long is the animation supposed to be?

If you’re able to include the full Photoshop window in your screenshots, that would be super helpful too. Appreciate it!

Alek

[JonathanArias]

photoshop 2025

animation is 30 seconds

The animations plays fine in them timeline.

 

 

The issue is in the export for web dealog, it stop playing about at almost 22 seconds:

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

It could be the overall size of the file a 28 MB GIF is pretty large.

Anything over 8 MB can suffer playing/buffering issues - common GIF limit, not specific to PS. 

Ignoring the Export for Web dialog, have you completed the save and tried opening in a browser?

[JonathanArias]

hi, ah!! that explains the out of memory alerts! why would it be that big, see attached.

[Conrad_C]

I’m not sure if it would explain the out of memory alerts, but 1366 x 768 px at a long duration would probably create a large file size, especially if the entire frame is shifting which definitely happens in that scrolling example. This is because of how GIF compression works; unlike modern video compression, animated GIF compression doesn’t work very efficiently. 

If the file size of animated GIF is too big, the usual strategies to allow more data compression are to do any combination of these as much as is practical for the project:

Reduce the width and height (in pixels). 

Use fewer colors in the artwork, favor flat art (avoid gradients and continuous tone). 

Lower the frame rate / increase the interval between frames. 

Shorten the duration. 

Design the animation to minimize the number of pixels that changes over time. When every pixel changes from frame to frame, that is a worst case scenario for GIF compression and guarantees large file sizes. 

If the website allows using a more modern and efficient video codec such as H.264, post the animation using that instead; the file size is likely to be much smaller. 

[Kevin Stohlmeyer]

Agreed - you are converting a video timeline to a GIF which will always create file bloat IMO. Video timelines are great for creating videos but not the best for frame animation/GIF formats. 

[Trevor.Dennis]

Kevin, it's building the animation that is so much easier in a video timeline if you have multiple moving elements.  With one moving element you can make frames with step and repeat and use Make Frames from Layers, or you can tween.   It takes no time at all.  But when you add a second element, it gets complicated.  You have manually turn on the right layer for each frame. That's bad enough, but gets much worse when you need dissimilar movement.  At this stage, the frames are the frames. You can't change that without messing up the first element, so you have to work out the relative movement between the two (or more elements) and it takes a long time and the results are nearly always a compromise.  Plus, frame animations are jerky.

If you use a video timeline you can stack video groups and treat one independently of the others.  It's super easy, and far less complicated.  I only cottened on to this recently, and even then I didn't think of exporting the video timeline to a GIF.

It turns out that you still use Export > Save for Web, which I got from one of Conrad's posts.  I am not sure I'd have thought of it otherwise.  This has 150 frames, is just 150kb, and is smoother than if I did it with a frame animation timeline.  Plus it loops!  

Video timelines have way more options than frame animations. Something else I have been doing is render out a short clip and bring the .m,p4 back into a new timeline. This gets around some complications.  I will almost certainly be using video timelines going forward.

[Trevor.Dennis]

I expect you realis that you are showing us a video timeline that you have exported out as a frame anomation.

It has 500 frames, and the last one has a 13.4 second delay. 

I suspect what has happened is that when you animated the virtical movement there was some sort of inconsistancy of the movement and overal time, although I don't have a clear idea of what particular circumstances would cause that.

Another possibility is that the end of work area marker was positioned before the end of the video.  

How exactly did you export the video out to a GIF?

[Trevor.Dennis · Accepted solution]

Scratch my last reply.  It ocurred to me that there might be a frame limit, and that turns out to be the case.

You are going to need to work out what percentage of the timeline was completed, and adjust the speed to get inside 500 frames.  

BTW the file size was only 7.3mb

[Conrad_C]

This was my thought too. If the GIF animation is longer than 500 frames, Save for Web cuts it off. And the original screen shot does show Save for Web at 500 frames.

If it needs to be longer than 500 frames, maybe it could be exported from the Photoshop timeline as a video, and then that video could be rendered to a GIF animation using software other than Photoshop, such as Gifski (free).

[JonathanArias]

hi, ok. i think this may be it. I was asked to make a 30 second gif.. was that too long to make?

[davescm]

As an alternative, a 30 sec gif at 500 frames would be 16.7 fps which may still make a smooth enough scroll. Try reducing the video rate to 16.5 fps which is .06 sec per frame for the gif and 30 secs would use 495 frames.

Dave

[Conrad_C]

The length in seconds isn’t directly the problem, it depends on how you manage the other trade-offs.

Again, the issues are a 500-frame limit in Save for Web, and a very large file size. If you could achieve your 30-second animation in 500 frames or less, that would resolve the issue with the 500-frame limit; davescm has already suggested a way to do that which is to lower the frame rate. The file size would have to be addressed by optimizing the design more for GIF compression, which I talked about in my other reply.

For example, when I post an animated GIF to support a reply in this forum, I try to keep it under 2-3MB so it loads fast. So one thing I do is set the frame rate to 8 frames per second because that's good enough for a demo GIF but saves a lot of space (fewer frames to render and store). Although whether that works for your project depends on how it looks and if the client would accept it. I also try to keep the width under 960px and minimize the amount of movement and colors in it, again to keep the compressed GIF file size down.

[Trevor.Dennis]

You could do it with a fraction of the frames if you used one frame per page, and tweened opacity between each page.  Maybe overlap each page by a couple of lines.   Or still use a video timeline and fade between frames and export to GIF.