Question. why are animated gifs and apng file limited to 20mb in size here. when they are the bigest space hogging files to upload? wile the rest including videos to my understanding is 100mb?

Just curious cause ive run arross some gifs and apng files that are too big for here with out degrading the quality.

You've said it yourself:

when they are the bigest space hogging files to upload?

They're so heavily restricted because the formats are such an inefficient use of space compared to just using webm

APNG has a few advantages though, as it can be a lossless format. That said, so can webm with vp9, even if almost no one uses that feature.

A 100MB PNG file will be delivered to 99% of users as a few hundred kilobytes due to the fact samples are enabled by default.

A 20MB GIF is always going to be a 20MB GIF because samples aren't generated for them - wasting bandwidth for both the user and the server, especially when a webm probably would've been much smaller and can have samples generated.

I loved Catbox FAQ which in past said "Why can't I upload GIFs larger than 20MB?" with answer of "Are you stupid or something?"
Now it's changed to that GIF sucks, use WebM.

catchoftheday said:
Question. why are animated gifs and apng file limited to 20mb in size here. when they are the bigest space hogging files to upload? wile the rest including videos to my understanding is 100mb?

Just curious cause ive run arross some gifs and apng files that are too big for here with out degrading the quality.

If this is the case, then artist has made some extremely bad decisions when creating the file and they should be fixing their work.
Before this limit was in place, people would convert Full HD video files into 100MB GIFs, just because they can and those worked on iPhone.

Because GIFs already have 256 color limitation, increasing resolution above certain amount will end up straight up making it worse and worse. It's fileformat from 90's where they were couple hundred pixels so this color limitation wasn't that huge deal.

With APNG, it is way too extremely easy to bloat it to hell, so similar safetynet is required so people aren't just stupid and uploading stuff without optimization and lossless compression.

Additional factor is that GIFs are not sampled, so mobile users would be immidiately downloading the whole thing, where with videos, they buffer, so it only starts downloading once you hit play and downloads in parts. Also GIFs of 100MB are usually like 5 seconds max, where video of 100MB can be half an hour with good quality.

With images, PNG even optimized could actually become nearing 100MB if the resolution is high enough and this is usually always proper detail which we want. With GIFs it's usually just clunky mess.

Even now, it has been only handful of times where there has been like 40-50MB GIF by artist that's only available copy and even with most of those cases, reoptimizing the GIF or converting it into APNG has turned it below 20MB, rest of the cases it has been too complicated for GIF to begin with and it's converted into video.
Best one I remember was one artists Plurk page, where they had over 100MB GIF running in the background of their page from Imgur. That is definition of insanity and it basically needed to be converted into WebM regardless, because even 100MB filesize limit was exceeded.

faucet said:
A 100MB PNG file will be delivered to 99% of users as a few hundred kilobytes due to the fact samples are enabled by default.

A 20MB GIF is always going to be a 20MB GIF because samples aren't generated for them - wasting bandwidth for both the user and the server, especially when a webm probably would've been much smaller and can have samples generated.

This is one reason I have been vocal about WebP samples on the site. This way we could more easily have samples for even animated GIFs and APNGs that would make browsing the website much better.
Also APNGs being sampled into single frame PNG is oversight that shouldn't happen.

ah ok thats makes sence. thank you for the explanation. i guess the reason i asked is cause i like to keep file original when possible. any kinda conversion besides lossless degrades the quality slightly.