Mogrify, Internet Explorer and GIF images

[garethk]

Hi all,
I used Mogrify to convert a set of several hundred TIFF images into GIF for publication to a web site. The images converted without error, conform to the GIF spec (according to JHOVE) and can be viewed in Firefox, Photoshop and every image viewer/editor I can find. However, when I began browser testing I discovered that the images are not displayed in Internet Explorer - the generated GIF images fail to display when referenced on the web page and when directly loaded into IE (i.e. a local copy of the file is dropped onto the IE window).

I've spent the last day looking for the cause of the problem and noticed a few mailing list/forum posts that seems to imply that this is a long-standing issue with ImageMagick (relatively long anyway, the ML posts were from 2006). Has anyone on this forum encountered the GIF IE problem? If so, are you aware of any way that the GIF images can be corrected so that they display in IE?

I've tested the images on several machines with different versions of IE (5,6,7) and the problem is the same. I'm able to view other GIF images and have examined the registry settings, but there doesn't seem to be a problem with IE's handling of GIF images. Frustratingly, I'm not able to access the original TIFF images at the moment to recreate the GIFs. I initially thought there was an image encoding problem with the GIF images and tried to correct the errors by re-creating the image. I've written various GIF images to new files, and have tried to convert the GIF images to TIFF and re-encoding the resultant TIFF to GIF again (using ImageMagick Convert, Mogrify, Photoshop and PaintShop Pro). Although all of the resultant GIFs can be viewed in the paint apps and Firefox, the resultant GIFs refuse to display in IE.



Thanks for any help

[fmw42]

what was your mogrify command?

try coalescing the animation frames and rebuilding?

convert animation.gif -coalesce animation.gif

try other disposal methods

see

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_basics/
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_opt/
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/anim_mods/

[garethk]

It was simply a Windows batch script that searched through a set of subdirectories and converted each TIF into a GIF through use of 'mogrify -format gif file.tif'. Each TIF file was converted into an equivalent GIF still image and were not being merged into an animation.

That's the strange thing. The command is so general and the results so obvious that I would have expected a lot of people to encounter the same problem. It seems impossible to believe that no one else has tried to convert TIFs into GIFs for a web site. I'm left with the possibility that it's something specific to the hardware or software I'm using that has caused the problem...

[fmw42]

Are all the tifs the same size? Are the delays between frames consistent? Does it have zero delay. If not then you may need to coalesce and/or make all the delays consistent. Also many people have complained that IE 7 does not show animations well. Search the forum, there has been at least one recent topic about it.

see viewtopic.php?f=3&t=14343

[snibgo]

These aren't animations, apparently.

garethk: can you post a link to a tif and the "bad" gif it creates? And tell us the exact command, and the IM version and platform.