I want to find the number of frames in a GIF then fetch the last one. For reference, my test file is:

I used imagemagick; it took 15 minutes to count the number of frames; it took 16 minutes to extract the last one. In both cases it used most of the disk's access: it has to inspect every single frame, creating an 8 MB temporary file for each. The test file has 149 frames.

Someone asked at https://sourceforge.net/p/giflib/mai...sage/35255030/ last year, never got a response.

I just read the spec: I don't see a frame count in the header. GIF wasn't invented to handle animation, as earlier docs note.

I extracted the first frame, then divided the file size by its size, but frames are of such varying size that didn't work.

Opening the gif in GIMP will assign a layer for each frame. The Layers window will show a count of these and allow you to extract whichever frame you want. However, this will work less well if the gif has not been constructed with a full image per frame.

gifview looks good.

also gimp - probably the best solution, because you don't really want the last frame, but the full image you see at the last frame, correct?

but still, check out gifsicle, esp. --explode and --unoptimize.

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Just for info, gifview is part of the gifsicle package.

https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/

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python-pillow's explode.py extracts individual frames in a jiffy; gifbuild returns a count quickly.

I don't want to interact with the GIF but append a caption automatically when a crontab job picks up the cartoon, to add a caption. ImageMagick's convert appends all the frames then the caption - not what I want.