GIFs are fun.
GIFs can be found all over the internet, in memes, in professional websites, anywhere.
But GIFs come with a huge drawback:
They're big, clunky, have poor compression, and a limited colour pallet.
Animated PNGs are great, because…

• Browser doesn't support animated PNGs? No problem! PNGs are supported by everything, so even if you're using Chrome 58 (last version before animated PNG support), you still see the icon of the user or studio no problem.
  
• They have MUCH better colour pallets! You're not limited to 256 colours without doing some fancy workarounds, because they're PNG! Everything just works.
  
• Gifs do support transparency, but ONLY 100% OR 0%. That means no shadows, no ghosts, or anything partly transparent without already knowing what the background is going to be, and putting that as part of your Gif. Animated PNGs, though, support partial transparency! Here is a great demo.
  
• Plus all the reasons here for animated PNGs over other formats, but, you know, webP support wouldn't be bad either…
  

So right now, uploading an animated PNG file to Scratch does the same thing that it would do with any image: takes the first frame. Even if your browser (Chrome 60 in my case) has animated PNG support, it just doesn't work. Same thing in the editor. If you upload an animated PNG, it only gives you the first frame. But with GIF, it gives you all the frames.
There are so many reasons to support a more modern and functional format than gif!
Please, add animated PNG support!

Animated PNG image from http://apng.onevcat.com/demo/ Includes partial transparency!

Endorsements

walkcycle wrote:

Strong support. APNG is a much better way to do this, other than maybe WebP. And this.

aking_ wrote:

Total support

blackout32 wrote:

Big Big Big Support. Animated images are everywhere, and .gifs have low quality.

aking_ wrote:

(and I still support this btw)

Strong support. APNG is a much better way to do this, other than maybe WebP. In fact, Scratch should remove support for any other animated graphics and make APNG the only animated non-Scratch-project format on the Scratch website. And this.

walkcycle wrote:

Scratch should remove support for any other animated graphics and make APNG the only animated non-Scratch-project format on the Scratch website.

No, that's… That's ridiculous.
Support for adding compatibility for APNG, though.

Fupicat wrote:

walkcycle wrote:

Scratch should remove support for any other animated graphics and make APNG the only animated non-Scratch-project format on the Scratch website.

No, that's… That's ridiculous.
Support for adding compatibility for APNG, though.

Yeah, I agree, there's no real need to remove GIF support, it's not like it's harming anyone.


Gif proceeds to go on a murderous rampage.

Big Big Big Support. Animated images are everywhere, and .gifs have low quality.

JGames101 wrote:

Gif proceeds to go on a murderous rampage.

They are murder on a computer's resources. And low quality.

For backward compatibility, static gifs are not going away any time soon, sadly. But kissing the moving kind goodbye is not any big loss.

walkcycle wrote:

They are murder on a computer's resources. And low quality.

For backward compatibility, static gifs are not going away any time soon, sadly. But kissing the moving kind goodbye is not any big loss.

I mean, it's not like for most people, gifs are doing any harm on Scratch. Maybe animated thumbnails and profile icons would have gif support removed, but I definitely don't want to see uploading gifs to stop working. Scratch runs fine for most people, animated icons don't really provide any performance problems on Scratch, despite being gifs. And if it's not a problem, why remove the feature, at least until very few people are using Gif anyway?

No support, I see no way this could benefit Scratch

I-Iz-A-Litten wrote:

No support, I see no way this could benefit Scratch

APNG is much more efficient and easier on computers than GIFs. Basically, any animated studio icon or user icon could be a lot better looking (you can't really notice it though) however, what this would hopefully allow them to do would be add animated project thumbnails. They've said they don't allow them because it lags if you have too many (even just one on lower-end or older computers). But APNG is much less intensive on computer resources AND better looking because it doesn't have a limited 256 colour pallet and support for semi-transparent tones just like any other PNG.
Non-animated GIFs have been almost completely replaced by regular PNGs, because they are just better in every way.
So it would only make sense that animated GIFs would be replaced by APNGs.
All it would take is for GIF makers to start outputting as PNG. No one would notice, it would just look nicer and perform better.

walkcycle wrote:

Strong support. APNG is a much better way to do this, other than maybe WebP. In fact, Scratch should remove support for any other animated graphics and make APNG the only animated non-Scratch-project format on the Scratch website. And this.

No.
I am not converting my gifs to pngs.
Too much work for losing something.


EDIT: ARGHGH WRONG ACCOUNT AGAIN

miniremix wrote:

walkcycle wrote:

Strong support. APNG is a much better way to do this, other than maybe WebP. In fact, Scratch should remove support for any other animated graphics and make APNG the only animated non-Scratch-project format on the Scratch website. And this.

No.
I am not converting my gifs to pngs.
Too much work for losing something.


EDIT: ARGHGH WRONG ACCOUNT AGAIN

My original suggestion had nothing to do with removing gif support. It was just to add APNG support.

JGames101 wrote:

miniremix wrote:

walkcycle wrote:

Strong support. APNG is a much better way to do this, other than maybe WebP. In fact, Scratch should remove support for any other animated graphics and make APNG the only animated non-Scratch-project format on the Scratch website. And this.

No.
I am not converting my gifs to pngs.
Too much work for losing something.


EDIT: ARGHGH WRONG ACCOUNT AGAIN

My original suggestion had nothing to do with removing gif support. It was just to add APNG support.

I wasnt replying to your original suggestion, was I?

I support APNG support on its own, but itll be hard to do and will result in like a day of scratch being offline

miniepicness wrote:

JGames101 wrote:

miniremix wrote:

walkcycle wrote:

Strong support. APNG is a much better way to do this, other than maybe WebP. In fact, Scratch should remove support for any other animated graphics and make APNG the only animated non-Scratch-project format on the Scratch website. And this.

No.
I am not converting my gifs to pngs.
Too much work for losing something.


EDIT: ARGHGH WRONG ACCOUNT AGAIN

My original suggestion had nothing to do with removing gif support. It was just to add APNG support.

I wasnt replying to your original suggestion, was I?

I support APNG support on its own, but itll be hard to do and will result in like a day of scratch being offline

Well, it did kind of seem like you were going against the whole idea because of that post, but that's probably just me misinterpreting it.

Anyway, I don't think it would take a day, because they'd develop it for a while, and then push the update, so maybe Scratch would be offline for a few minutes, but that's all.

Support!

I never thought png file ca be animated i thought it only gif.

I would love to see APNG support added to Scratch.

Last week I was helping my 10-year old with getting her TVPaint animation into her Scratch project. We had to break out her character as a PNG sequence and convert it to animated GIF to preserve transparency. It looked okay but naturally the GIF did not look as nice as her original animation because of the limited colors and single-bit alpha channel.

In looking for an alternative, we stumbled upon the APNG Assembler utility, but then found Scratch did not support APNG.

We also tried importing a PNG sequence but it was way too much trouble re-sorting the sequence to its proper order for Scratch. She eventually just settled for the inferior quality GIFs since she had a lot of sprites to import.

APNG seems like it would be the ideal choice in this situation. I hope the developers can implement it soon.

JGames101 wrote:

aking_ wrote:

Total support

Ooh I'm famous now

(and I still support this btw)

Support, since you said it was much better than GIF.

support, for all reasons mentioned above.

What… what is an Animated PNG? Do you mean GIF? No support,since this would be really confusing.

EDIT: Oh… nope,you don't mean GIF. However i no-support for the reason i said before.

Botcho_Otkho wrote:

What… what is an Animated PNG? Do you mean GIF? No support,since this would be really confusing.

EDIT: Oh… nope,you don't mean GIF. However i no-support for the reason i said before.

It wouldn't be confusing. Animated PNGs are regular PNG files, but with animation. They would just be animated when you upload them. It wouldn't be confusing at all.