APNG now fully supported by the wiki

[Mister Wu]

Recently ImageMagick started supporting APNG in full, as a result, the wiki now fully supports APNG resizing while still keeping the animations.

I've noticed that the APNG files with the .png extension are easier to maintain as clicking on the image immediately opens the full size image, while with the .apng extension the Firefox browser asks the user to download the image first.

Now that APNG resizing is fully supported, how should we move? Should we make a proposal about its use? What extesions should we allow: .png for easier maintainability of .apng for clearer distinction?

 

[Lakituthequick]

Fricking finally

Anyway, I suggest to just keep using the .png extension as .apng is not official as far as I know, plus the file page identifies APNGs as being animated just like GIFs.

 

[Ray Trace]

How will filesize be impacted by this? Some gifs (specifically those of animated 3D models) I had to downscale because gif was too big.

 

[Mister Wu]

How will filesize be impacted by this? Some gifs (specifically those of animated 3D models) I had to downscale because gif was too big.

APNG is always smaller than GIF, as it supports all the palettized modes of GIF but uses more advanced compression techniques, some of them being similar to inter frame techniques. In fact, programs such as APNG Optimizer detect if there are less than 256 colors in the picture and immediately switch to palettized mode, I suggest using that software to see how much the size of GIFs is reduced.

As far as new images not yet dithered to become GIF are concerned, my experience with the APNG Optimizer is that the Alpha channel does a very good job at helping reducing file size dramatically, since you render with a transparent background you should see great benefits even when working in Truecolor with Alpha. The last sequence in my test page doesn't even use the Alpha channel and yet manages to fit a short animation like those usually seen in games like Mario Kart or the Mario sports games, so I suggest trying to play a little with PNG rendering and then using APNG Assembler, of the same suite of the APNG Optimizer, to see which parameters might be useful for us for Truecolor with Alpha animations.