2009/8/2 Ilmari Karonen <nospam(a)vyznev.net>et>:
It seems to me that delivering *static* thumbnails of
GIF images, either
in GIF or PNG format, would be a considerable improvement over the
current situation. And indeed, the code to do that seems to be already
in place: just set $wgMaxAnimatedGifArea = 0;
So, my questions would be:
1. Is there a reason we don't do this already?
Careful to only do it if in fact definitely scaling. Animated GIFs are
in use on lots of page on en:wp, for instance, when there's reason to
put a small animation right there on the page rather than a click
away.
3. Alternatively, if the problem is ImageMagick taking
too much time to
read animated GIFs even just to extract only the first frame, would some
other scaling program be better? Indeed, it should even be possible to
write a bit of PHP code to pull out just the first frame of a GIF file
and hand it off to ImageMagick for scaling.
ImageMagick is a Swiss army knife - it does everything and isn't the
best at anything. I would be unsurprised if there was a tool to do
this specific job much better.
- d.