Paco Hope

I put movies in my photo gallery (I use a program called Gallery for it), but I want an icon that indicates that it is a movie, not just an image. The Gallery software puts a really ugly movie icon in, and all movies get the same icon. I have a straightforward (albeit baroque and UNIX-ish) process for making an animated GIF icon.

Here’s how I make an animated GIF. I use QuickTime Pro and ImageMagick.

The Process

• Use QuickTime Pro to save your movie as a series of images. I chose PNG format images, 256 colors, 1 frame per second. To get less than a frame per second, use fractions like 0.1 or something.

• I had too many images (about 30 or 40 is probably all you really want). I did various things like rm *[2,4,6,8,0].png to remove lots of frames. (that removed all the even numbered frames)

• Then I run a snippet to zero-fill the file names that have only 1 digit. Annoying. This is bash syntax, not even /bin/sh, must be bash. All my frames were named munch*.png:

for i in munch?.png
do
   mv $i munch0${i#munch*};
done

• Another snippet for doing the file names that have only 2 digits.

for i in munch??.png
do
   mv $i munch0${i#munch*};
done

• Now convert all the PNGs to GIFs. The convert program is part of ImageMagick:

for i in *.png
do
  convert -scale 100x84 $i ${i%.png}.gif
done

• Now choose one to be the final frame you’ll animate and give it a unique name: mv munch099.gif final.gif It needs to have a unique name so we can give it a unique delay. We’ll indicate that it is supposed to be animated longer than the others.

• Now roll all those GIFs into an animation:

convert -delay 20 -loop 0 munch*.gif -delay 2000 final.gif bigloop.gif

The -loop 0 means loop forever. You could also do -loop 1 or -loop 2. The delay number is in tenths of a second. All the first frames are animated at 200ms (-delay 20). The last frame gets -delay 2000 so that it pauses 20 seconds before restarting. I used a high inter-frame delay (200ms) because I was animating so few frames. I ended up with about a180K animated GIF thumbnail.

Integrating with Gallery

Interestingly, you can then install this file as MovieName.thumb.jpg and it will still work. Browsers don’t seem to care that the file is named .JPG but is actually an animated GIF. It still works.