Adobe Photoshop CS4: Still no animated GIFs? Part III

So obviously our beloved Image Ready is never coming back, so how is one supposed to open animated GIFs in all this mess. A couple of years back I wrote a work around for opening animated GIF’s in Photoshop in a windows environment. I later followed up with a more detailed description on how to do it.

Why Adobe … Why?

The posts mentioned above are two of the most popular on my entire blog and have received a lot of feedback. The Internet is littered with questions about this very issue and even the Adobe forums are full of angry posts. So why hasn’t Adobe done the right thing and added an import animated GIF feature that used to be there? The functionality is there since you can trick Photoshop into opening an animated GIF. I think it comes down to money and the fact that Adobe has become a monopoly in this area, especially since it bought Macromedia several years ago.

Adobe does have an official solution to this issue though.

Open the animated GIF file in Adobe Fireworks. Fireworks provides editable layers and timelines for animated GIF files.

Adobe’s official response to all this is to buy fireworks of course. Yes, buy an entire software package that you don’t need just to open animated GIFs. I love Adobe products, but this is just ridiculous especially since all everyone is asking for is a feature that was always included with Photoshop in the past. Many of us need to open an animated GIF once a year.

My suggestion is to always save all of your animated GIF source files as layered PSDs. You can quickly create and edit animated GIFs with these as often as you wish. If you do need to open GIFs without the original source files try the work around or use a 3rd party product to screen grab each frame and create a new layered PSD.