Gif with multiple gifs playing simultaneously

[KayDub7117]

I am trying to make one large gif that has several smaller gifs (6) all playing simultaneously over and over. Is there a way to do this? I currently have all 6 of the gifs I want to use on a background and I can get them to each animate but they are playing one gif at a time. Thanks for any help you can offer!

[rich2005]

It is going to be a very convoluted process so just some general pointers. There are scripts and plugins to merge animations and backgrounds

1. For all processing change the animated gif from Indexed mode to RGB.

2. You will have to work with pairs of images and build up to the final combined 6.

3. Usually images require the same image size (in pixels) and the same number of layers.

4. You can combine the 6 on a transparent background and leave the background image as a final operation.

It might help if you can post one or two of the gif's and some indication of how you intend to place the animations.

[Ofnuts]

The first difficulty is that all merged GIFs should have the same number of frames. If this is not the case there is a solution: replicate each animation until it reaches the least common multiple of the set. For instance, if you have an animation with 6 frames and one with 4 frames, the LCM is 12, and you can make a 12-frames animation by combining 2 copies of the 6-frames one with 3 copies of  the 4-frames one. If you have many GIFs the LCD can be quite big.  

If you use interleave-layers:

interleave-layers requires all the merged animations to have the same image size, so you have to evaluate the total size of the canvas, and in each animation:

• Image>Canvas size to set the image size to the required final size
  
• Use the "Offset" widget or the Position widget to move the animation to the required position in the canvas
  
• Make sure you have Resize layers: all layers, and Fill with: Transparency
  

Once this is done, applying interleave-layers is easy, just keep all the defaults. Advice: try your hand with an image that merges two or three animation first.

Interleave-layers requires the images to b in RGB mode (GIF are typically loaded as color-indexed mages) so you will likely have to use Image>Mode>RGB.

Which naturally introduces a big warning:

• GIFs are color-indexed, the color of each pixel is an index into a "colormap" that contains at most 256 colors
  
• Unless all your GIFs use the same colormap, your combined animation will have much more than 256 colors
  
• When exporting to GIF, if will be color-indexed again and reduced to 256 colors. Quality loss with grainy/pixellated images will ensue
  

This isn't a problem with interleave-layers or Gimp, this is a restriction of the GIF format.