I am looking for a simple way to create an animated GIF in a native Android application. The source files should be JPEG (from camera or what ever) and the output should be saved as GIF on the device.
I do not want to know how to play animations or animated GIF files.
To be clear: I want to know how to put single images frame by frame into a "movie" and then save it as a .gif file.
e.g. This App can do want I want to do.
See this solution.
https://github.com/nbadal/android-gif-encoder
It's an Android version of this post.
http://www.jappit.com/blog/2008/12/04/j2me-animated-gif-encoder/
To use this class, here is an example helper method to generate GIF byte array. Note here the getBitmapArray() function is a method to return all the Bitmap files in an image adapter at once. So the input is all the Bitmap files in one adapter, the output is a byte array which you can write to the file.
public byte[] generateGIF() { ArrayList<Bitmap> bitmaps = adapter.getBitmapArray(); ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); AnimatedGifEncoder encoder = new AnimatedGifEncoder(); encoder.start(bos); for (Bitmap bitmap : bitmaps) { encoder.addFrame(bitmap); } encoder.finish(); return bos.toByteArray(); } To use this function, do the following then you can save the file into SDcard.
FileOutputStream outStream = null; try{ outStream = new FileOutputStream("/sdcard/generate_gif/test.gif"); outStream.write(generateGIF()); outStream.close(); }catch(Exception e){ e.printStackTrace(); } 
This might help you. It's a class which is used to generate gif files.
It did very well for me, It create file fast and good quality images
//True for dither. Will need more memory and CPU AnimatedGIFWriter writer = new AnimatedGIFWriter(true); OutputStream os = new FileOutputStream("animated.gif"); Bitmap bitmap; // Grab the Bitmap whatever way you can // Use -1 for both logical screen width and height to use the first frame dimension writer.prepareForWrite(os, -1, -1) writer.writeFrame(os, bitmap); // Keep adding frame here writer.finishWrite(os); // And you are done!!! If you only want to display these bitmaps like an animated gif, you can create an AnimatedDrawable using this code:
AnimationDrawable animation = new AnimationDrawable(); animation.addFrame(getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.image1), 10); animation.addFrame(getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.image2), 50); animation.addFrame(getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.image3), 30); animation.setOneShot(false); ImageView imageAnim = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.imageView); imageAnim.setImageDrawable(animation); // start the animation! animation.start(); Solution 1
Have you seen this article? ..... it's with source code..
As I know, I think android won't play gif animation image. You should use webview that will play gif animation..
http://droid-blog.net/2011/10/14/tutorial-how-to-use-animated-gifs-in-android-part-1/
and if you can..
http://androidosbeginning.blogspot.in/2010/09/gif-animation-in-android.html
Solution 2
Android provides Drawable Animation.
Gif is basically a set of images with a constant time delay in frames. You can not directly play gif in android. I've worked lot on playing gif animation in android.
When playing gif we also handle all calls of playing frames by our self. So this is not a best approach
If you have set of images just play them by a delay in frames. That would be the all you want.
You can not make gif in application by native code as well. There are some drawbacks as well for using gif format. Which I had faced in my game.
If you have set of drawables you can use AnimationDrawable for showing aanimation like gif as well. It can also set the any View.
I had also made a custom view to play gif animations. First I load gif and convert it into InputStream then I pass it to my custom view class to play the gif.
public class GifWebView extends View { private Movie mMovie; InputStream mStream; long mMoviestart; private boolean play; public GifWebView(Context context, InputStream stream) { super(context); mStream = stream; setPlay(true); mMovie = Movie.decodeStream(mStream); } @Override protected void onDraw(Canvas canvas) { canvas.drawColor(Color.TRANSPARENT); super.onDraw(canvas); final long now = SystemClock.uptimeMillis(); if (mMoviestart == 0) { mMoviestart = now; } final int relTime = (int) ((now - mMoviestart) % mMovie.duration()); mMovie.setTime(relTime); mMovie.draw(canvas, 20, 20); if (play) { Log.i("reltime", "" + relTime + ",duration:" + mMovie.duration()); this.invalidate(); } } @Override public boolean onTouchEvent(android.view.MotionEvent event) { return true; }; public boolean isPlay() { return play; }