Longtion GIF Animator 5.0

This software is good only for the most trivial animations. The interface is promising at first glance but in reality it's very poor because of some extremely simple, incredibly obvious missing features that I am honestly surprised the author didn't consider:

1. It doesn't show the original filenames of the frames. That means when you import 20 frames and they get imported out of order, you have to step through one at a time, eyeball which frame belongs where, then manually dragging them around to the correct order. Super fun with 50+ frames. Made better by point 4 below.

2. You can select many frames at once, but editing the properties only applies to the first selected frame, not all of them. You add 50 frames to a file and want to set the delay of all of them to something besides the default 1/10th of a second? Good luck. Right click frame -> properties -> delay -> type a number -> OK -- repeat 50 times. And if you don't like your settings, maybe you want it to play a little slower, well, do it all over again. No keyboard shortcut for frame properties dialog plus the fact that the "Enter" key doesn't close the dialog when the focus is on the Delay box, means keeping one hand on the mouse while you're editing properties one frame at a time. Good stuff.

3. Despite its high price and claimed fancy features, it can't actually use a global palette unless all frames have the same palette to begin with. It performs no color matching, it simply replaces colors. It is not possible, at all, to load a series of 24-bit frames (e.g. a common uncompressed BMP) and create a global palette for the entire animation. You're stuck with the local palettes it generates, and switching an image to the global palette breaks your image. There is no undo for this, so you must remove the frame and re-add it again after you make this mistake. This is even more fun with point 4.

4. You can reorder frames by dragging them around with the mouse. However, the frame view only shows 8 or so frames at a time (depending on your screen size), and unfortunately the scroll bar doesn't automatically scroll up and down when you drag a frame to the edge. This means that if you need to, say, move a frame from the end to the beginning, you must repeatedly drag the frame as far as it will go, set it down, scroll with the scroll bar, and repeat. For a 30 frame file, do this 5 times. For a 100 frame file, do it 15 or so times. Per frame that you want to move. It's a blast. All that and more for $50.00 -- the most expensive GIF animation software you'll find on the internet.

In short, this program sucks. It turns a simple task into a time consuming process. It provides only basic image editing features that are best left to other applications with better capabilities -- I'm not sure why it has an image editor at all. However, the important part, actually composing images into an animated GIF, it falls far short on. It's an expensive version of MSPaint with a crappy GIF animator.

It may be worth it if the UI wasn't designed by some strange programmer in his basement with absolutely no concept of how normal humans interact with computers. Calling author, calling author: did you know that people who don't want to spend 45 minutes creating an animated GIF file do *not* want to have to repeat the same action 300 times? Now you do. Get to work, or you certainly aren't getting my money at least.