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RobLengacher's avatar
RobLengacher
Community Member
4 months ago

Media Library - Consolidating Image Files Affecting Animated GIFs

A slide has multiple instances of a simple animated GIF that is set to loop once. Evidently, it's a "feature" of Storyline to only have the animation run on the first image instance, but not on subsequent instances. I think I can solve the animation issue by having a separate image file in Media Library for each instance. The problem is, I cannot force Storyline to see the separate instances as separate files, even after deleting all existing instances, creating and uploading separate files with unique names. No matter what, Media Library knows and only shows a single file. Any ideas how to force Storyline to do what I need?

By the way, I know animated GIFs are bloated and buggy by nature. The dev just needed a simple animation with transparency that could be customized across multiple projects, so it should have been a decent option.

    • RobLengacher's avatar
      RobLengacher
      Community Member

      Thanks for taking the time to share these ideas, Tom. I appreciate it.

  • A few ideas:

    • You could set a trigger to hide the animated gif and then show it. Then you could set queue points to hide and show when you want
    • If it's a looping gif and continues looping, but you don't want it to, you could have a still image from the gif that is hidden and then change the state at some point to become normal. If that image sits on top of the looping gif, you won't see the gif
    • I use screentogif (free). You could edit the gif in there so it only loops once. Copy and repeat the frames and set the gif to not loop. 

     

    • RobLengacher's avatar
      RobLengacher
      Community Member

      Thanks for the ideas, Tom. I created the animated gif below in Adobe Animate, so it's already set to loop once. On the slide, it's not a single image, but 10 separate instances. I already had the developer add a static image to show until the animated gif needs to start for each instance. The problem is that after the first instance fires for lowercase "g" none of the other separate instances will show the animation because it seems that Storyline knows that single media file has looped once in one of the instances. I already tried a variation of the hide/show trigger approach, but that doesn't work either.

      Normally, I love Media Library, this seems to be a case where it's working too well.