The maximum number of distinct colors?

[bruce0715]

"The maximum number of distinct colors in a GIF is 256 but this image has 4896 colors and can't be encoded properly."

I have printed my ndarray, and all the values in the array are the integers between 0 and 255, I don't understand why it always give me this error? my array shape is [3,128,128,32]. Please help, thanks

[stephkno]

Same problem, I'm getting a
RuntimeError: The maximum number of distinct colors in a GIF is 256 but this image has 9212 colors and can't be encoded properly.
when trying to save gif of numpy arrays of size [96, 96, 3].

[tanyaschlusser]

Hi there! Thank you for your comments. I am sorry I didn't notice these comments until today.
There are two possible issues here:

1. There are no more than 256 colors per frame, but over the course of the animation there are more than 256 colors total.
2. There are more than 256 colors per frame.

Option (2) is not allowable for a GIF because the GIF color lookup table for a single image has 256 slots, so even though there are 8 bits for each of R, G, and B (meaning 256 ** 3 possible colors available for a GIF), there can only ever be 256 distinct colors in a single GIF image, or a single frame of an animated GIF.

Option (1) is possible for a GIF, but is not implemented in this library yet: currently this library only uses one lookup table for the entire animated gif, so even though you could theoretically have 256 distinct colors per frame (e.g. {R=0, G=0, B=[0, ..., 255]} for one frame of the animation, and then {R=0, G=[0, ..., 255], B=0} for the next frame) it is not possible in this library.

Please let me know if there is interest in me implementing one lookup table per animation frame; I have not considered it but if lots of people want to I am happy to look into it — or of course would welcome a pull request!

[Eshan-Agarwal]

@tanyaschlusser Thanks for explanation I am also getting this error