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IrfanView 3 - Extract All Frames From an Animation

SUMMARY: Need to edit the individual frames that make up an animated GIF? IrfanView can extract all of the frames in the animation.

IrfanView supports the loading of animated GIFs. In fact, the GIFs will remain animated in IrfanView's display window unless you specify that you want to stop animated GIFs from playing.

However, what if you want to edit an animated GIF file? You'll probably need to first extract each frame out of the file. Luckily IrfanView makes this easy.

1. First, from Windows Explorer, find and/or create a directory to hold the extracted frames. You'll have to create a directory now as you cannot from inside IrfanView's exporter.

2. Load an animated GIF into IrfanView.

3. Choose "Options" - "Extract All Frames".

4. Select the directory to hold the extracted frames and press "OK".

Your animated GIF will now be converted to individual BMP images in the desired directory (the original image will remain untouched).

For example, if you loaded a GIF named award.gif and it contained four frames, the destination directory would contain four files:

award_frame_0000.bmp
award_frame_0001.bmp
award_frame_0002.bmp
award_frame_0003.bmp

Note that depending on how the animated GIF was designed, each frame after the first frame may only contain the part of the image that changes between frames.