Adobe Photoshop CS3 Can’t Open Animated GIF Properly Solution

The Warning Dialog Box

Well It was few months back, when I started using Adobe Photo-shop CS3 the new version from adobe but never realized that the adobe company forgot to add editing feature of animated gif files.They had combined/bundled the features of Adobe Image Ready with Photo-shop.When I was working on web designing in which I was editing some images which I wanted to be saved as gif file then I realized this problem .So I searched the web and found a solution it might look simple but it may be tricky for some people.

Screen Shot of Adobe Discussion Forum started since May 2007

Adobe's solution is to use other Adobe products, which is Fireworks, to open an animated GIF profile properly. It appears that the feature is purposely lost and the development of Image ready is no longer continued. Most of the feature not included in Photoshop from Image ready is incorporated in Fireworks. Some people might found this as no problem at all, but, this will reduce efficiency and comfortableness in editing an animated GIF. Where else can we edit an animated GIF with outstanding filters and image effect like Photoshop? It’s a waste of time to edit each frame one by one from Fireworks to Photo-shop. However, there is still a solution to this, as mentioned by Brett Dalton, a member of the forum. Photo-shop can still open the file correctly from the Import menu, however, its only applicable to Windows OS only.

Steps to be followed

Choose File > Import > Video Frames to Layers

In the file browser in Windows, type *.* in the File Name and press Enter or click Load.

It will not open any file, but it will view every file without restriction of Type of Files.
Open your animated GIF files, it will show you a dialog box regarding the imports. Press OK to import as default.
Voila! The file is opened in animation frames.

You can view the animation time frames from Windows > Animation

Photo-shop CS3 won’t even open import videos windows without Quick Time version 7.1 or above installed in your computer.

You should download it first from apple site or you can get it from the latest k-lite codec package.

How about MAC? MAC can’t do like the above solution by typing *.* in the file name. But here is an alternative:

Change the animated GIF file you want to open into .MOV file. Therefore the Import Video Frames to Layers function will recognize it as a video file and will open it as animated sequence.
However, this method won’t always works and the quality of the file is questionable.

The conclusion is: either you use Fireworks as GIF editor or using Photoshop’s import Video to Layers feature. Just don’t waste your time on some trivia stuff like this. It’s too immaterial for a busy designer.