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+---
+title: "How to make transparent GIFs easier shareable by adding a checkerboard background"
+date: 2024-10-15
+tags:
+- imagemagick
+- gifsicle
+- bash
+- aseprite
+---
+
+I'm currently taking part in the ["#hARToween" daily art challenge](https://social.horrorhub.club/@stina_marie/113220760493893634), as I want to
+work on my pixelart skills and drawing a 128x128px pixel drawing each day[^1] for a month seemed
+like a good idea. You can follow my posts [in this thread](https://chaos.social/@foosel/113233763230193057).
+
+I'm using [Aseprite](https://aseprite.org/), and recently came across [the "record for aseprite" script for it](https://sprngr.itch.io/aseprite-record)
+that allows taking regular snapshots of what I'm currently drawing so a timelapse can be created from 
+that. And that works nicely, but I had to realize that the timelapse would come with transparency until
+I came to the background during my drawing, which looked really weird when sharing the resulting GIF.
+
+So I looked into adding the usual transparency checkerboard background to the GIF with a quick script, 
+and of course, [ImageMagick](https://imagemagick.org/) once more to the rescue. Alas, the resulting GIF was quite large and ImageMagick's
+optimization options caused glitches in the GIF. So I looked for another option to optimize the GIF and 
+came across [gifsicle](https://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/).
+
+The result is this bash script which will take a GIF and an optional background image to set,
+add the background (or a freshly generated checkerboard pattern of the right size) to the GIF, then compress
+the GIF:
+
+``` bash
+#!/bin/bash
+
+GIF=$1
+BG=$2
+
+BASE=$(basename "${GIF%.*}")
+OUTPUT="$BASE.bg.gif"
+
+if [ -f "$BG" ]; then
+    echo "Adding background image $BG to all frames of $GIF..."
+    magick "$GIF" -coalesce null: "$BG" -compose dstOver -layers composite "$OUTPUT"
+else
+    size=$(gifsicle --sinfo "$GIF" | grep "logical screen" | xargs echo -n | cut -d" " -f 3)
+
+    echo "Generating a $size checkerboard pattern and adding it as background to all frames of $GIF..."
+    magick "$GIF" -coalesce null: \( -size $size tile:pattern:checkerboard \) -compose dstOver -layers composite "$OUTPUT"
+fi
+
+echo "Optimizing $OUTPUT..."
+gifsicle --batch -O3 --lossy=35 "$OUTPUT"
+
+echo "...done!"
+```
+
+Example call:
+
+``` plain
+$ gif_bg 14.gif 
+Generating a 256x256 checkerboard pattern and adding it as background to all frames of 14.gif...
+Optimizing 14.bg.gif...
+...done!
+```
+
+I'm quite happy with the result:
+
+{{< toot "https://chaos.social/@foosel/113306303596486838" >}}
+
+[^1]: Well, almost, I was at MRMCD and then a bit under the weather after and thus missed some days that I'm now trying to catch up on again.
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