gif and images being transformed, breaking it all

Hi,

Is the problem with the new Uploader, or the old Basic HTML Uploader?

Try the other one....

Danno

they both transform the anim gif

Hmmmmm......

I Know this sounds odd, but.....

Capitalize .GIF on your PC file and upload again. If it's already in caps, change to .gif and retry.

Yes, I know that sounds weird, but give it a try. I remember some odd problem with the file extension and jpeg/gif in the past.

Danno

nop, I tried to replace my bla.gif with bla.GIF and it told me you cannot replace a gif with a jpeg but I know it's a gif, it's animated, jpeg can't be animated, ...

so I tried to upload bla.GIF as a new file and it did the same, removed the animation and put a black background and grain

You're on the right track. That error about replace gif with jpeg is exactly what I recall. I think there is a problem with the receive software that somehow thinks some gifs are jpegs.

I know EXACTLY how a gif is built (right down to the encode bits).

Let me do a quick test....BRB.

Danno

OK....what I'm seeing is the stored file gets a .jpg file extension. Look at the URL for the stored file on your tests.

Looks like the upload is converting the .gif to .jpg for storage. That's a new problem.

I'd file a Support Case, so they can figure out why that's happening.

Danno

Edit: On some tests, I'm getting a gif extension, but the entire gif isn't present. From a quick breakdown of the code, it appears only one "frame" of the animation is present. The file size is a give-away that it's losing something.

hahah thank you,
I filed a support case already and it never even made it to the list of my open cases, ...

Maybe you have better luck than me that's been 3 days that I am trying to report that problem.

my url actually has gif in my case but same issue

Hmmmmmm.....

I think that a .GIF is getting stored with the .jpg (explains your error), and a .gif is getting stripped to a single frame. The former problem is the one I recall from past. The later is something I haven't seen before.

I can't find a working combination with either uploader and/or the Replace function.

Danno

no, me neither I could not find a solution,
I uploaded my 2 gif anim to another image hosting for the time being.

have you had luck filing a support request ?

and support is still not taking my request, no live support, can someone tell me how to get support for this issue?

it's obviously been a verified issue, ...

answer from support, UNBELIEVABLE
so now what ?



Don E.
Support
Posted Wednesday, 11/5/2008 11:58 AM Hello,

Thank you for contacting Auctiva Support.

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Auctiva Support.

You are not permitted to utilize animated gif's with Auctiva.

Those listings which you saw most likely added those gif's to an active listing within eBay using the eBay revise your item form.

Please feel free to contact us if you need further assistance in this matter.

Thank you
Auctiva Support

The most frustrating about Auctiva support is that they believe we are total dumbies, .. excuse my french but that is frustrating. Before calling it our problem and incompetence they could look at the issue.

I am an IT director and have been for the past 6 years and BELIEVE ME if my support group was behaving like this I'd layoff a couple.

When one of our users call and say email is not working, the first thing we do is we do a test and then when that's done, we don't go telling them that from now on they will have to use the phone, ... when there's a problem, WE FIX IT ...
At least in my world.



another response from auctiva,

Would you please send the image to my email address, gfishback@auctiva.com. I will investigate this matter further upon reviewing the image. I suspect that this image format will have to be changed to jpeg.

Thanks,
Auctiva Support

and I want to add, a GIF is a GIF, what the heck is this suggestion to make a gif a jpeg, jpeg are jpeg, gif are gif, I am not going to make a jpeg for a 2 color image that's what gif are for !

Thank you for contacting Auctiva Support.

You are not permitted to utilize animated gif's with Auctiva.


Mike or Jeff,

What's up with this problem? When did animated GIFs get the ax? I can't even get transparent background GIFs to load.

Danno

I found myself having the same problem today when I tried to post an animated gif. I am all the more surprised since the help states that animated GIFs can be used in listings. Directly from help under "Images":

Can I include animated GIFs in my listing?
Yes, you can include animated GIFs in your listings.


If this has changed, the help page needs to be updated.

Hi Community,

Thanks for helping to bring this issue to our attention. I believe it was once possible to upload animated gifs into Auctiva but it appears that any animated gifs you try to upload now are losing their animated qualities. This issue has been reported to our engineering team for investigation but I'm not sure what will become of it yet.

If the decision is made not to resume supporting the hosting of animated gifs, we will definitely update our help page on that subject to reflect that change in behavior. I'll post again to this thread when more information on this issue becomes available.

If you have any additional questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our customer support team using the web form on the following page of our site: http://www.auctiva.com/help/requesthelp.aspx

-Mike

Hi Mike,

It's not just about animated gif.
Even regular simple gif are being transformed.

a regular gif with transparent background is transformed and a white background is applied, or a black one.

Grain is added to it as well and makes the quality of the gif very bad.

If what you are telling us is that this will not be solved it is not only animated gif you will have to not support anymore it is all the gif. Maybe jpeg support can be removed as well ?!?!


Sorry I am sarcastic but saying that animated gif would be removed from support, next gif all together are not supported, ... is not the solution. Fixing the post upload treatment of gif seems to be a better solution
Fix rather than ignore the issue, ... just my thoughts

Hi luckyhair,

Thanks for clarifying that this issue affects non-animated gifs as well. My suspicion is that this being caused by a "bug" in our system and will be corrected with an upcoming site update, but I won't know for sure until I hear back from our engineering team. As I mentioned previously, I'll follow up on this thread as soon as I am able to collect more information on this issue.

-Mike

ok, thank you,

sorry if I am a little "hard" on you guys, it's just been very frustrating that no one actually listen but you are listening so anyway, ...

Thanks

Thank you Mike.

Latest from support, this is so BOGUS !!!!



Posted Monday, 11/10/2008 10:54 AM Hello again,

I have just been informed that the uploading of Animated GIF's will not be supported, but you may still use externally hosted animated GIF's in your listings.

Please feel free to contact us if you need further assistance in this matter.

Thank you
Auctiva Support
BLA
Customer
Posted Monday, 11/10/2008 10:56 AM this is a bogus answer, even a simple plain white gif is being applied a black background.

Have you also been informed that you are not supporting GIF either ?
Maybe you are also not supporting JPEG?
Don E.
Support
Posted Monday, 11/10/2008 11:05 AM Hello,

Thank you for contacting Auctiva Support.

I'm trying to keep it in laymans terms for you but here you go, this is direct from the engineers:

1) The Aurigma uploader always converts the image to jpg before uploading. So if the image started out as animated gif then it will be non-animated jpg when it gets to the server. As per above animated gifs were never officially supported but they may have worked prior to recent changes, however any edit, watermark, resize, etc would break the animation.

2) Any conversion of a gif to jpg has issues with color conversion of 16 million to 256 colors.

3) We are keeping the html uploader around for just such occasions. It will only be accessible from the image upload page and not the lister page. Gif format files are only 256 colors so they
are smaller in size and will not cause the server out-of-memory issues we see with non-resized jpg files.

4) Animated gifs will continue to be supported as externally hosted images. We will also look into the specific issue with the HTML uploader and animated gifs for the 4.6 release. The MS GDI+ image processing library will never be happy with non standard gif formats (animated or transparent etc) so we can never officially support them

5) The 'Replace' function on the imagenmanagement page will remain as a single-upload HTML uploader so that also is another way that animated gifs may be uploaded on Freetiva. However if we find users continue to upload large images via that page then that also will be limited.

6)Pursuant to #1 above we can now support other image formats (png, bmp, tif) with the knowledge that they will be converted and resized to jpg automatically by the Aurigma uploader before uploading to Freetiva.

This will be addressed later today on the community forum if you would like further clarification.

Thank you
Auctiva Support

Hi luckyhair,

Update - This issue has been discussed among our engineering team for most of last week and, unfortunately, the way our image uploaders handle gif format images is going to remain the way it is now for the most part. While we're not exactly sure what caused this change in behavior, the behavior you have described makes sense based on the way the uploader is designed and we are not going to attempt to change our uploading interface to support these images (only a tiny fraction of the images in our system are in gif format).

If you upload gif images using the Auctiva Uploader, it is normal for the images to become distorted because that uploader will convert all images to jpg format during the uploading process. Any conversion of a gif file to a jpg file has issues with color conversion from 16 million to 256 colors that can potentially cause distortion between the original image file and the resulting jpg image as it appears within Auctiva.

We are going to be looking into the issue of the HTML Uploader causing animated gifs to lose their animated qualities further and, if it is feasible to correct that problem, we may be able to get it resolved as early as our next major release, which is tentatively scheduled to take place in mid-late December. While it is possible you will be able to successfully upload your gif images after that update, we will never be able to officially support non-standard gif formats due to restrictions on our image processing library.

As long as you are unable to successfully upload your gif images into Auctiva and have them come out the way you would like, you could potentially host those images outside of Auctiva and then code them into the HTML of your listings while you are creating them through Auctiva.

I wish I had better news for you, but I hope you find this information to be helpful nonetheless. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our customer support team.

-Mike

Hi Mike,

I checked my library for file dates. The last successful upload of an Animated GIF to my library occurred on 10/4/2008. I uploaded the same GIF to a PowerSeller's library the next day for a new template.

I do believe I used the HTML uploader for both. I do like the new uploader, but old habits are hard to break.

I do recall having a problem with a transparent background GIF, and checked my local file date for the image. It was October 18th. I don't know for sure if that date is reliable for a broken upload or not, but it is one I recall having problems.

I have been doing some GIF tool evaluations over the past several weeks and noticed I was getting odd errors and incomplete images, but I thought it was my software as root cause. Well, now I'll have to go back over my tests and notes.

The GIFs use a color table that is limited to 256 colors, but they do have the transparency and animation (multiple time-spaced images) that make them helpful in template building. I haven't had problems with photobucket as a backup, so I hope you won't mind my making that recommenation while you folks continue to investigate the problem. If you can restore that capability to just the HTML uploader, that would be fine (to me). GIFs aren't the bulk, just those nifty functions for templates.

Dan

Thank You Auctiva.

Did some testing today with GIFs.

The problems with time-spaced animation images and transparency seem resolved in the newest uploader.

Danno