I generally create gifs of good flashes and post them here. If the gif I make is low quality in order to make sure it doesn't lag on lower-end phones (like mine). There are a lot of flashes that don't need this and are kept at their original size but I made a gif of tabuley's flashes and they are 1920x1080 and have a lot of space where there is nothing, so if the flash was downscaled and cropped to have only the action, should I post it or keep it to myself?

Because these are conversions from a somewhat inaccessible format, and in to one that is always lower quality, I'd consider your animations to be derivative artistic works of their own. There's original artistic input in how you do colour reduction, dithering, frame rate/timing, scaling, etc.

So since you're making the artistic decisions, if there is a big white space that adds nothing to the work, and it's not appropriate to keep in the format you're using, I wouldn't see an issue removing it.

While we empathize with making sure things work on all devices, if there is a higher quality gif posted, the lower quality gif will always get removed. The system just isn't set up well for multiple copies of the same posts.

However, I see nothing wrong with including an smaller offsite copy (e.g., an imgur link) in the description field or comments for others to enjoy. I'm sure there are plenty of users who would appreciate having that available.

SyldraTheCat said:
Because these are conversions from a somewhat inaccessible format, and in to one that is always lower quality, I'd consider your animations to be derivative artistic works of their own. There's original artistic input in how you do colour reduction, dithering, frame rate/timing, scaling, etc.

So since you're making the artistic decisions, if there is a big white space that adds nothing to the work, and it's not appropriate to keep in the format you're using, I wouldn't see an issue removing it.

thanks for the kind words, unfortunately, I just use a program that catches frames and does it for me. The only difference between me and other people is that perhaps I just end up doing it so I can view it on my crappy phone. Anyone could probably download the program and posts gifs, but I guess I'm one of the only people who bother to do it.

As for parasprite...

Sorry, cant scroll down on my crappy phone's textboxes. As fot parasprite, I'll just post the gif on the site if its resolution is equal to the source. If not then I'll post an imgur link in the comments, sound gold?

Pendraggon said:
thanks for the kind words, unfortunately, I just use a program that catches frames and does it for me. The only difference between me and other people is that perhaps I just end up doing it so I can view it on my crappy phone. Anyone could probably download the program and posts gifs, but I guess I'm one of the only people who bother to do it.

As for parasprite...

Even though a tool is doing all the work for you, it's still your artistic decision to use the program. In theory someone could make true-colour GIFs, or decide not to use dithering, or use a better dithering algorithm, or even use some future widely supported animated image format, and make pictures that look better than yours.

This is assuming flash->gif converted duplicates are allowed to exist in the first place. parasprite didn't make that clear exactly.

Personally I disagree with requiring it match the size of the source. The GIF is already reduced quality from the source, and a second GIF which just contains more whitespace has no reason to be considered superior. It's an artistic decision of the person doing the conversion, just like the other parameters I mentioned earlier.

Random thought: someone could zoom a flash 10x, make a 5000x5000 GIF, and claim it's higher quality than yours.

parasprite said:
However, I see nothing wrong with including an smaller offsite copy (e.g., an imgur link) in the description field or comments for others to enjoy. I'm sure there are plenty of users who would appreciate having that available.

The problem is that the large gif will load if you click on it.

Pendraggon said:
Sorry, cant scroll down on my crappy phone's textboxes. As fot parasprite, I'll just post the gif on the site if its resolution is equal to the source. If not then I'll post an imgur link in the comments, sound gold?

Sounds good.

By the way, I'm not saying you can't post them, only that if you do post them I can't guarantee they won't get replaced by a better copy (if there is one).

SyldraTheCat said:
This is assuming flash->gif converted duplicates are allowed to exist in the first place. parasprite didn't make that clear exactly.

Flash/gif/webm "duplicates" are allowed (that is: a flash version, a gif version, and a webm version of the same animation). We prefer the original artist to do it in most cases, but there's nothing inherently wrong with posting them.

Lance_Armstrong said:
The problem is that the large gif will load if you click on it.

We still only keep the better copy, whichever that is. There isn't much we can do about that until we have a way to group multiple posts (or provide multiple options for download).