This 1-minute logo produced by The GIMP
You really need check it out !

DISCLAIMER:
No flame ! No ads ! Only free software I'm using in my Web-life and only Unix, of course.

1. Optimization of animated gifs.
I do not like pages with a lot of animated gifs (this is another story) but if you really need to use them please save our bandwidth !

Look at animated gif published on this page (Now this gif was changed to much smaller (and optimized) picture !)

I'm complaining about its size - about 40Kb !
Now compare with my copy - it's only 8Kb now !

As you see the only difference is the size of images and the difference is huge but it takes for me only time I spent to type command:
gifsicle -O2 web-secure.gif -o websecure.gif

You can find this nice little utility at Gifsicle home page. Currently it's version 1.1.1 and it runs under Unix environment ! It's free, it's flexible, it's works and help you save bandwidth !

I did a screenshots of layers dialog in Gimp illustrate how gifsicle did optimization of the original gif.

Original	Optimized

If you aware that gifsicle produced image difficult to edit there is an option -U to unoptimize it. I didn't check how correct it works but you can save your original image at least (xcf format in Gimp).

Anyway, if you want to check how good is your animation gif you may try this form:
Please, keep in mind I wrote this script just for illustration, no checking for valid file types !

It would be GREAT to incorporate idea/code from Gifsicle into the GIMP !

General references about optimizations of images you may find at home page of Bandwidth Conservation Society
I'll publish my own tips in future...

Leave a message ? oleg@sai.msu.su