Template talk:Bad GIF

Purpose

What is the envisioned purpose of this tag? Are we going to tag every non-animated GIF on Wikipedia with this thing? —Bkell 07:51, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Lot's of transparent GIFs won't show up as transparent in Internet Explorer if they are PNGs. Even if it's less efficient, we shouldn't discourage GIFs for icons and such.--ragesoss 15:50, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

The purpose of this tag is for when an image suffers from bad GIF compression, due to factors including the limit for 256 colours. If you want to discuss this further, please contact me on my talk page -bdude Talk 07:43, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Issues with Internet Explorer rendering rendering PNG files when converted from GIF is irrelevant, because:

• There are no translucent pixels in the GIF
• The PNG can be put in color type 3, which uses a pallet, like a gif.

Issues with PNGs are because transparency in color other colors types like 6 (truecolor) is not properly implemented in IE 5 or 6.

• If the above 2 conditions are done, IE will render the PNG identically to the GIF.

But, again, this isn't an issue in converting a non-animinated GIF, if it is done correctly. In fact, if done in incorrectly, not only will the image not have proper transprency, it will often be larger than the GIF. Conversions should be done with someone who can guarentee it has been converted to an 8-bit (or less) palletted/indexed PNG. Kevin_b_er 04:37, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

BadGIF template

This is from User talk:68.39.174.238#BadGIF template.

I noticed you added the {{badGIF}} template to Image:KOOP.gif. What were your reasons for doing so? This is a new template, and I'm still trying to figure out what it should be used for. —Bkell (talk) 09:46, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Image:KOOP.gif is a GIF, which I was always told wasn't for photographs, which that seems to be... (Granted, if it turns out that it was gotten from a website as a GIF, there's not much that can be done about it.) (Also, the template doesn't say anything about converting to a JPEG, argh) 68.39.174.238 21:45, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

It's a black and white image and doesn't use anything that GIF is required for, so JPG or PNG would both be more appropriate for the picture. ~Kylu (u|t) 22:57, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

In all honesty though, it's not used anywhere and there's a much better pic of him on the articel. It could probably just be deleted... 68.39.174.238 22:58, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Good point. It's been up there since 2004 and nobody's touched it. ~Kylu (u|t) 23:04, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Mostly I'm trying to figure out whether the intended purpose of this template is to mark all non-animated GIFs on Wikipedia. After all, Wikipedia:Preparing images for upload says right at the top that non-animated GIFs should never be used, so if we really wanted to do things right we would convert all non-animated GIFs to PNGs. But it would be way too much work to tag the tens of thousands of non-animated GIFs, even for an idealistically-motivated guy like me. —Bkell (talk) 03:08, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Do we know any bot-writer types that could automate the process? I figure, have it download all the GIFs, auto-convert them with a commandline tool made for the purpose, make a large gallery sheet so the bot owner can check to make sure there are no errors, then upload them all and change existing links to the new filename. I certainly wouldn't want to be the person to do download, conversion, reupload, and reference-renames by hand. o.o ~Kylu (u|t) 03:13, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

The problem I have with that idea is that until Wikipedia has a better method for replacing images with versions in another format, we will lose the entire file history when a new PNG version is uploaded, which is unacceptable, especially if a bot is doing it en masse. To take one example, many GIFs on Wikipedia have dubious copyright claims (because GIFs are no different from other image types), and if we replaced all of them and lost all their histories we would have no way to contact the original uploader and possibly clarify the licensing.

By the way, I'm going to copy this conversation to Template talk:BadGIF, which is probably a more appropriate place for it. Please continue this discussion over there. —Bkell (talk) 03:22, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

I have created a bot that is similar to what you asked for. It's called the PNG crusade bot and it is actively working under my direction to convert the images marked as ShouldBePNG and BadGIF. Unfortunately, though, it uses the Microsoft compressor which is not as good as the GIMP's compressor. This means that images this bot can't make smaller due to its inferior compressor are left alone to be manually converted using the GIMP's compressor. ---Remember the dot 01:33, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

BADGIF BS

This template is annoying - why place it on a 3-color 1kb gif diagram? Certainly PNG is inferior on size, and JPG is inferior quality. Only SVG makes sense but WHO IS GOING TO automate converting bitmap diagrams into vectors? NO ONE. Therefore until I can make my own SVG images, it's silly to complain with tags like this. Tom Ruen (talk) 19:24, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Why can't you make your own SVG images? There are high-quality free cross-platform tools to do this, such as Inkscape. For more tools, see this list. --ChrisRuvolo (t) 17:22, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Seconded. If you're using a bitmap editor to make diagrams like Image:4-cube column graph.gif, you're going about it the wrong way. Things like this are very easily produced in drawing programs as XFig and Inkscape, by specialist mathematical languages, or even by writing in a vector language (fig, SVG, PostScript) manually. Using vector graphics means the images are much easier for other people to edit. For example, if you had produced all your images as SVG files, I could download them all and use a simple shell script to adjust the line thickness and node colours. As they are now, I'd have to open each bitmap manually and change it. —Psychonaut (talk) 22:44, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

No editors - it's a screen dump from a program! I could export a file with vector information but waste too much time trying to deconstruct SVG formats from examples which never work and I have to upload by trial and error to see what I've created. Tom Ruen (talk) 04:55, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

ChrisRuvolo and Psychonaut: You can't just expect people to learn how to use vector drawing software to upload their images as SVGs. Bitmaps are a lot easier to create, and there is much more support for them.

Tom Ruen: There are cases where a GIF can be smaller than PNG, particularly in very small files, where PNG's slightly larger file size overhead becomes significant, but usually PNG allows better compression than GIF. Particularly if a PNG optimiser such as PNGOUT or OptiPNG is used. Additionally, using a tool like TweakPNG, it is possible to go into a PNG and modify things like the colour palette, without having to load and resave it.

If, specifically, you're talking about Image:2-cube_column_graph.gif and the like, then yes, the file size can be reduced if you convert it to PNG. CountingPine (talk) 09:04, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

When I save this image as GIF vs PNG I get these sizes: (80% bigger in PNG - maybe other bitmap editors are smarter at saving PNG?) Tom Ruen (talk) 22:24, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

• 1,353 2-cube_column_graph.gif
• 2,310 2-cube_column_graph.png

Here are my results with this gif:

• gif2png: 1347 bytes
• gif2png + optipng: 1345 bytes
• gif2png + pngcrush: 1342 bytes
• gimp (indexed): 1287 bytes
• gimp (RGB): 1754 bytes

What tool are you using to get 2310 bytes? It appears to be non-optimal. --ChrisRuvolo (t) 22:51, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

PNGOUT, and the latest version of OptiPNG, can automatically convert from gif to png. Here are my results:

• optipng: 1245 bytes
• pngout: 1142 bytes

PNGOUT is slower than optipng, but almost always gives the best results.

By the way, I probably should have mentioned that, with the more complex images, such as Image:10-cube_column_graph.gif, there would actually be real benefits in remaking in SVG form. There are lots of overlapping lines on the image, and it's difficult to follow. It would be more useful to have those lines as vectors, so the image can be zoomed in to get clearer detail. CountingPine (talk) 13:26, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Interesting results. I use PolyView 4.36 [1] for generating PNG from screen captures. I'd use a vector format if it was SIMPLE, like Obj. It would be nice to have a simple line-drawing script format maybe like something BASIC-ish: view 100,100; pencolor red; line 10,10 to 90,90; brushcolor blue; Circle 50,50,5. That would be easy to generate from my program. Or like an RPN PostScript format? Tom Ruen (talk) 20:38, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

No one is required to learn to use vector graphics software to upload an image. Note that the raster images are not being deleted. However, vector graphics do provide advantages over rasters for collaboration. That is one of the reasons why SVG is preferred. No immediate action is required, but the template indicates that an improvement is requested. --ChrisRuvolo (t) 19:47, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I just find it annoying, like someone running around being critical of things that will NEVER be magically fixed, NOR necesarily should be. Those who CARE about specific images are those most interesting in upgrading, and if no one who cares has the capability, it's wasted effort to tag them, and wasted negative energy on Wikipedia to things that are good enough. Tom Ruen (talk) 22:24, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

There is a whole group dedicated to improving images, the Wikipedia:Graphic Lab. There is also a bot to convert GIFs to PNG, the PNG crusade bot (talk · contribs · logs). No, it will not be magically fixed, but there are a lot of people working on improving the overall quality level of images on Wikipedia. --ChrisRuvolo (t) 22:51, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

(Unindent) The main problem with converting GIFs to PNGs is that MediaWiki scales PNG images poorly. See commons:Template talk:BadGIF. So for graphics it is not a good idea to convert them to PNG images. --Timeshifter (talk) 08:57, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

In case anyone is reading this now, this hasn't been true for a while. PNG scaling was fixed long ago. It was still true for black-and-white PNGs, but even that has been fixed now. There really is no reason to use GIF for static images (except possibly really small ones, where GIF is smaller.) — trlkly 00:28, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

APNG

I want to convert GIF animations to APNG. --84.61.135.85 (talk) 10:37, 14 November 2009 (UTC)

Even 2 years later, not all web browsers support APNGs. Internet Explorer 8, the most popular web browser at the moment, does not support them. This is still a bad idea. — trlkly 08:21, 16 September 2011 (UTC)