If there are several cycling ranges, it can take a very long time for all of them to get synchronized, so the GIF could be impossibly long.
Can you share your image, so that I can have a try ?

The general idea to produce a GIF version is :

Use grafx2 to export the 12 distinct images
1) flatten layers
2) immediately save as frame00.png (for example)
3) open Palette
4) select the color range that you want to scroll forward, except its last color. Ex: if colors 16-31 are scrolling, click color 16 and drag to color 30
5) click Swap button
6) click the second color of the range. In above example: color 17
7) exit Palette (OK) and save the image as frame01.png
repeat steps 3 to 7 until you have produced all the individual images.

Since you have 2 color ranges with 12 and 6 colors , you may want to proceed like this:
frame 00 - initial
frame 01 - shift range A
frame 02 - shift range A and range B
frame 03 - shift range A
frame 04 - shift range A and range B
etc.
By the time you reach frame 11, you will have shifted range A 11 times, and range B 5 times, so it loops.
(edit: Or you can shift each range each time. This way, B is faster, it loops twice)

Produce a GIF animation from this series

For example try http://ezgif.com/maker it seems simple and nice. Upload your 12 frames You can see the resulting animated image in browser, and "save as" on your computer.



Edited by yrizoud - 27 February 2015 at 3:48pm

This seemed extremely tedious, so I wrote a Python script to automate it.
It's not fully debugged yet, but seems to work for all my test cases.

It generates all the necessary frames, which you then only have to assemble (I'd recommend using gifsicle, personally)

The script is here
(or raw here)

It's not ready for formal release yet: I want to improve help and error handling first. That's why it's only on bpaste for now.

Example output animation,
created with

ccycle /tmp/anubis4.png /tmp/an.gif 0-23
gifsicle --delay 10 /tmp/an*gif > /tmp/ancycle.gif

It requires Python3 and Pillow.

EDIT: I have now implemented custom offset arrays. Here's a link to an image demonstrating them:

http://imgur.com/V0jj0z4

This simply does several consecutive cyclings at different speeds. the ccycle command used is

ccycle /tmp/anubis4.png /tmp/ar.gif 0-23:0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,0,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,0,4,8,12,16,20,0,8,16

I just made another example, but won't link it here because it's huge (6mb gif, 240 frames)

ccycle /tmp/anubis4.png /tmp/ac.gif 0-7 8-11:1/2 12-16:1/3 17-20:-1/4 21-23:1/5

this one:
* cycles 0-7, 1 step per frame
* cycles 8-11, 1 step every 2nd frame
* cycles 12-16, 1 step every 3rd frame
* cycles 17-20 backwards, 1 step every 4th frame
* cycles 21-23, 1 step every 5th frame.



Edited by neota - 28 February 2015 at 3:18am

Well, if you are not familiar with the commandline, it may be easier, though tedious, to stick with just GraFX2.
But if you are decided that you want to try my script:

Python 3 is the language that the script is written in, the latest packages for installing that are here . I guess you are probably running Windows -- There are two MSI files in the list of files (one for 32bit windows, one for 64bit windows). One of them should be suitable to install on your system.

Pillow is an imaging library for Python 3. It provides instructions on how to install here. in short, once Python 3 is working, the command

easy_install Pillow

ought to be all that is needed.

Beyond that, I'm not experienced with running python scripts from a Windows console window (cmd.exe), but I gather it works the same way as on Linux. (which is to say, ccycle commands like the ones I wrote above would work as is, providing that the current directory contains the ccycle script.)


Edited by neota - 28 February 2015 at 3:00pm