Good image/GIF uploader?

JValencia

I currently use Photobucket to upload images and .GIF's, but Photobucket makes those images linkable back to their site.

I want to upload GIF's to my website without the option of linking back to the uploader site. Does anyone know of a good site that doesn't link the uploaded image if clicked on?

Also, for anyone that uses animated GIFs on their website - got any good recommendations for the GIFs to run smoothly? Max frame count? Good file size? I know Photoshop has an option to save images and GIFs for the web.

Thanks! :]

r_fletch_r

why are you using animated gifs on an art website. thats like painting with turds.

JValencia

To show off some of my Tech work. Mostly shaders and game-play programming stuff. A good combo of images, gifs and videos in the right places should be effective, especially if you have more than just image renders to show :]

r_fletch_r

I stand corrected :]
might be worth sending RenderHjs a quick PM he does nice gifs for all his TexTools previews.

JValencia

Sent him a message.

Awesome gun, btw! The high poly renders stood out to me.



If anyone has any tips or advice on the subject, let me know! :]

renderhjs

just to repeat what I messaged to juanitudev1

But before that, one reason one might go with GIF clips:
* easy to share on messageBoards, emails, wikis or other html based editors.
* can loop so its perfect for showing 2-4 sec. clips showing results or step instructions
But where I think it doesn't suit its purpose:
* show a whole app or bigger area in action
* if its longer as say 15 seconds going close to a minute or more.
For those cases I would suggest youTube or Vimeo, though YT has better support among boards, wiki's and alike to be embedded unlike Vimeo.


for the GIF clips i use 2 open source tools:

• CamStudio for screen recording
• VirtualDub for cutting and exporting to GIF

From my tests the most important thing was to find a right size for all the tools I wanted to show, because to big = to long loading, to small = impossible to show everything what matters.



So go as small as possible without resizing later the footage. In camstudio you can set a fixed size for recording e.g 64x64. Once you hit F8 for starting to record you can move the area around. In camstudio once you hit stop it will ask you to store the recorded clip.

The next step would be to drag the clip in Virtual dub, cut off the pieces that are boring or took to many seconds (2-4 sec. are best in the end). Next I usually change the framerate (video > change framerate) in virtualDub. This will convert the recorded 30 or 24 fps to say a 8 fps or 10 fps gif so I get less frames but still good animations. Finally under file > there should be a export entry with export to GIF or so. That GIF exporter already compresses the video in a very impressive way (color tables, dithering, filesize).

And thats how I made them, every clip took me like 4 min to capture, cut and export.

renderhjs

arh reading the first sentences again regarding uploading. I use a FTP client (FileZilla) to upload to my own server, image hosters are no good if you are serious about keeping projects alive say even after 1 year or 2.
Because it matters if you embed those media files say here on polycount which absolute URL you used, if its on a free image hosting it might vanish at some point - keeping people in the dark after a year or several months because that free image hoster decided to dump you files.

Usually I care about the stuff I post here, even for myself its a useful track back of stuff I did in the past and it would be just super sad loosing images and media that was posted with it.

kodde

I think imageshack works quite fine if you register a free account with them. If you do register you get to use a direct link to your image (avoid linking back to their site).

r_fletch_r

dropbox might also work well.

renderhjs

again those 2 options are more likely to cause an expired URL.

Sage

I'm confused, you mentioned you have your own website. Is it a free site with no ftp options??? To load up things to my site I just use the free extension for firefox called fireftp and it does a good job.

to have the gif show up just use the right html tag <image src = mycoolgif.gif> coolgif</image> There was nothing special to it. You can format how the page loads the image with css or go really old school and just use raw html...

to show off the gif on polycount for example you just tell polycount where to find the image on your site and that's it.

[ img ]http://coolstuff/bleh/img/meh_swapuvw.gif[ / img ] ... I broke renderhjs link on purpose for the example... also you don't leave any spaces for img tag

JValencia

kodde & r_fletch_r: Thanks for the tips!

Sage: I use weebly, so I don't think there are ftp options. I could be wrong though.
The <image src = mycoolgif.gif> coolgif</image> code works! Thanks! I found out that you could also add width="number" height="number" before src to change the size of it.

Sage

I looked into weebly and it's kind of cool if you are not totally anal about the code that goes into your site. it seems you can use image perfect to do all your image uploading needs...

I use Imageready for all my gif animation needs... it works good enough... In Imageready for example you can say how long a frame stays up before it moves the the next frame. Sometimes it's useful. I haven't tried the apps renderjhs suggested, but I imagine they are more streamline.