Gif Optimization?

Ideas
1

Hi!
I’m currently making a self hosted website for the first time, and Boostrap Studio has been a great tool for exporting the website straight to my server. I find the image optimization tool unbelievably helpful, It’s the best really.

But what I’m running into is that, for some reason, IPhone’s really don’t like auto-playing WEBM’s, regardless of if they’re muted/even have audio or not. This sucks, because Webm’s are pretty small- but not much you can do about it I guess.

On the other hand, Gif’s autoplay correctly without any issue at all but are ridiculously large, and a huge pain to convert to and from. It always feels like they’re super bloated in comparison to a proper video format. For me right now the best option for converting a video to a gif, or reducing the gif’s file size has been through ezgif, which is a slow and annoying process. I shouldn’t need to upload my file to a website just to compress it. It’s also a pain if you have more than one file you need to process at once.

A tool similar to the one that exists for images would be great for gifs, since it seems they still have their use somehow. Or maybe I missed something and videos work fine, but this has been my experience.

Thanks!

2

Hello,

can’t you use MP4 videos instead of WEBM? Autoplay works with them as long as the video is muted.

The GIF format comes from the early days of the web and is outdated. A suitable alternative would be WebP – it also supports animations and alpha channels like GIF, but the file size is much smaller.

1 Like
3

MP4 should autoplay fine on iPhone as long as it’s muted. You definitely don’t want to use animated gifs (or even animated webp) for anything that needs to have video quality, or is over a few seconds in length. There are still valid uses for animated image formats like gif or webp, but they would only be for very short, simple things. A LONG time ago, I used this gif in a navigation menu for a magician’s website. When you’d hover over the menu link, this would image would be the background
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