Template talk:BadGIF

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[edit] Purpose

What is the envisioned purpose of this tag? Are we going to tag every non-animated GIF on Wikipedia with this thing? —Bkell 07:51, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Lot's of transparent GIFs won't show up as transparent in Internet Explorer if they are PNGs. Even if it's less efficient, we shouldn't discourage GIFs for icons and such.--ragesoss 15:50, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

The purpose of this tag is for when an image suffers from bad GIF compression, due to factors including the limit for 256 colours. If you want to discuss this further, please contact me on my talk page -bdude Talk 07:43, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Issues with Internet Explorer rendering rendering PNG files when converted from GIF is irrelevant, because:

• There are no translucent pixels in the GIF
• The PNG can be put in color type 3, which uses a pallet, like a gif.

Issues with PNGs are because transparency in color other colors types like 6 (truecolor) is not properly implemented in IE 5 or 6.

• If the above 2 conditions are done, IE will render the PNG identically to the GIF.

But, again, this isn't an issue in converting a non-animinated GIF, if it is done correctly. In fact, if done in incorrectly, not only will the image not have proper transprency, it will often be larger than the GIF. Conversions should be done with someone who can guarentee it has been converted to an 8-bit (or less) palletted/indexed PNG. Kevin_b_er 04:37, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] BadGIF template

This is from User talk:68.39.174.238#BadGIF template.

I noticed you added the {{badGIF}} template to Image:KOOP.gif. What were your reasons for doing so? This is a new template, and I'm still trying to figure out what it should be used for. —Bkell (talk) 09:46, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Image:KOOP.gif is a GIF, which I was always told wasn't for photographs, which that seems to be... (Granted, if it turns out that it was gotten from a website as a GIF, there's not much that can be done about it.) (Also, the template doesn't say anything about converting to a JPEG, argh) 68.39.174.238 21:45, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

It's a black and white image and doesn't use anything that GIF is required for, so JPG or PNG would both be more appropriate for the picture. ~Kylu (u|t) 22:57, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

In all honesty though, it's not used anywhere and there's a much better pic of him on the articel. It could probably just be deleted... 68.39.174.238 22:58, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Good point. It's been up there since 2004 and nobody's touched it. ~Kylu (u|t) 23:04, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Mostly I'm trying to figure out whether the intended purpose of this template is to mark all non-animated GIFs on Wikipedia. After all, Wikipedia:Preparing images for upload says right at the top that non-animated GIFs should never be used, so if we really wanted to do things right we would convert all non-animated GIFs to PNGs. But it would be way too much work to tag the tens of thousands of non-animated GIFs, even for an idealistically-motivated guy like me. —Bkell (talk) 03:08, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Do we know any bot-writer types that could automate the process? I figure, have it download all the GIFs, auto-convert them with a commandline tool made for the purpose, make a large gallery sheet so the bot owner can check to make sure there are no errors, then upload them all and change existing links to the new filename. I certainly wouldn't want to be the person to do download, conversion, reupload, and reference-renames by hand. o.o ~Kylu (u|t) 03:13, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

The problem I have with that idea is that until Wikipedia has a better method for replacing images with versions in another format, we will lose the entire file history when a new PNG version is uploaded, which is unacceptable, especially if a bot is doing it en masse. To take one example, many GIFs on Wikipedia have dubious copyright claims (because GIFs are no different from other image types), and if we replaced all of them and lost all their histories we would have no way to contact the original uploader and possibly clarify the licensing.

By the way, I'm going to copy this conversation to Template talk:BadGIF, which is probably a more appropriate place for it. Please continue this discussion over there. —Bkell (talk) 03:22, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

I have created a bot that is similar to what you asked for. It's called the PNG crusade bot and it is actively working under my direction to convert the images marked as ShouldBePNG and BadGIF. Unfortunately, though, it uses the Microsoft compressor which is not as good as the GIMP's compressor. This means that images this bot can't make smaller due to its inferior compressor are left alone to be manually converted using the GIMP's compressor. ---Remember the dot 01:33, 7 January 2007 (UTC)