I can’t believe I’m having trouble getting this question answered. Most of the hits in my search come up from 2003 or 2008 or somesuch and the answers are useless. The tech is just different. I know how to embed a GIF into my email. I sort of know how to make the GIF. I will be doing it in Photoshop CS5. I think I heard that the maximum FILE SIZE would be 2MB these days, but I know you can attach as much as 20MB to Gmail. We used to at work, anyway. What I want to know is PIXEL DIMENSIONS. The first searches suggested no more than 600 pixels wide by 400 deep. But they’re really talking about web page work and making stuff work on different browsers. I want to go probably twice that size. The people who will be getting it (Christmas card to ex-coworkers. I’m recently retired.) all have computers that can handle anything I send them. I don’t want to go through the trouble of the work if it isn’t going to work. I know you can’t resize after animation. So, anybody???
Even if you can’t find a direct answer, you can use a technique called abinary search to find the answer very rapidly.
Try sending a small gif to make sure gmail actually permits gifs. Open a second gmail account to use as your test target. You can have it open in a different web browser (as in, internet explorer instead of chrome, not just a different window) at the same time to avoid the hassle of sign in/sign out.
Try a tiny gif. Try a 20 mb gif. If the 20 mb one failed, try a 10 mb gif. And so on.
Shouldn’t take you long at all to find out what the actual limit is. Then you can use that for designing your cards.
Our you could look it up on the Gmail help pages. The limit is 25 Meg (It’s the same for an embedded file as an attached one). There’s no restriction on what type of file you can embed.
The only limit to pixel dimensions is going to be based on the computers that will receive them. You could make a 10,000x10,000 px GIF and it will send just fine if it’s under the size limit (which it could be if it’s mostly a solid color). However, the recipients won’t be too pleased at that. I’d generally recommend 1280x720 as a general-purpose limit. Almost everybody will have screens larger than either 1280x1024 or 1366x768.
That’s the answer I wanted. Thank you. I wasn’t worried about file size. And almost everyone who will get it has a full size Emac. What happens if they open it on on an iphone. Other than it being too small to see, will it size down? Will it still play?
It’s just too dependent on the browser and email software to give a good reply (also, I don’t know anything about iPhones). Most browsers will downsize images, but the it’s kinda hit or miss whether this works. Email clients frequently won’t display animated GIFs inline, so users will likely have to view the image in their browser.
Way bck when, I saw a website of “pages that will break your computer”, or some such. One of them was a single-color GIF of truly ludicrous dimensions (something like 100,000 by 100,000). The filesize was quite reasonable, due to the way GIF compresses, but most computers would run out of memory trying to decompress it for display.
As **Dr. Strangelove **said, there is no answer.
Or more accurately, there is a different answer for each of your recipients’ email suppliers, their email apps, their browsers, and their devices. So however many combinations of all those things you’re targeting, that’s how many answers there are.
Emac?
What, from 2002?
Oops. Sorry. iMac. Almost everyone getting this has a 27 inch iMac.
We all got the same computer. See previous post.
You mentioned iPhones, too. Do you all use the same browser (Safari, Chrome, etc.) and email client? If so, then you can just run a local test and send a mail to yourself.