Does anyone know of a tutorial or other guide to editing animated GIFs in Photoshop Elements?

[gfbugaboo]

I’m using PSE 18. With all this extra time on my hand and little in the way of photo-taking opportunities, I’ve been experimenting. I used online tools to create a couple of GIFs (one by converting an MP4, the other by uploading a group of photos), and then tried using Photoshop Elements 18 to edit them. Clearly, this is not a robust PSE feature. I can edit the layers comprising the GIF, of course, but usually cannot save the changes as a new animated GIF. Somehow it did work (sort of) the first time I tried. I had 79 layers, edited 7 as a test, and saved as a new GIF. I could not adjust the timing; that was greyed out. The resulting GIF did animate, with my changes visible, though the animation was choppy.

I suspect that I did not notice and try to select the Animate checkbox, because every time I attempted to do that subsequently, I got the “Save for Web can not animate the document because it is too big. To save this image as an animated gif, reduce the image size of the number of layers” message. I have searched this forum and the Web and have found no solution to that issue. In my experiments, I often saved the GIF anyway, without Animate checked. Sometimes, the resulting GIF was animated, while other times it was not (only a single layer was saved). I thought I would ask here before giving up and finding something else to experiment with. Anyone?

[Greg_S. · Accepted solution]

What are the pixel dimensions of the file you want to save as an animated gif?  I just took about 8 iPhone photos, layered them into one file and tried to create the gif.  I got the same message as you.  I then reduced the pixel dimensions to about 10% of the original (using Image>Resize>Image Size) and I was able to create the animated gif. Having 72 layers is going to create an enormous file size, so you may have to reduce the number of layers also.  I can't easily find the program's limitations of size.

[gfbugaboo]

I will play around with the size, but I did have the same issue with the other GIF file I tried editing. That one has only 15 layers and a file size of 244 MB, so I will experiment with that one. But with no documentation on file size and layer limits related to animated GIFs (and not much of anything at all on the topic, actually), it may not be worth spending much more time on it.

[gfbugaboo]

You are right: I resized to 25% and was able to save as Animated (even with 79 layers). Now I have a better idea of how to use the feature. It's pretty limited, but may come in handy some day. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.