Can't capture gif image with picamera

[windy54]

Hi,

I have been using example 4.1 from picamera read the docs to capture a JPEG file, this works. When I change the file extension to gif I just get a black image.

I can capture a gif image using raspistill .

I have just updated to the latest version of picamera ,1.4 and this has not solved the problem.

Does anyone know if this is an issue with picamera or am I missing an option.

import time
import picamera

with picamera.PiCamera() as camera:
camera.resolution = (1024, 768)
camera.start_preview()
# Camera warm-up time
time.sleep(2)
camera.capture('foo.jpg')

I have just been replacing jpg in the last line above with gif.

[R61zt]

Don't use gif. That format is so very Windoze 3.1. You might want to look at whether .png will do what you want. I realise that not every photo is of clouds and hedgerows best suited to .jpg. If you can do .png then unless you are writing a script to hack Netscape 1.0 that should do everything that you'd need.

[jamesh]

PNG will also compress better than GIF (Although GIF isn't necessarily a 'Windows' format). But JPEG is the only HW accelerated format, so will always be faster than the others.

[6by9]

And JPEG is natively in the YUV domain whereas PNG and GIF are RGB formats, so we have to do a format conversion as well as encoding it.

[DougieLawson]

Don't use gif. That format is so very Windoze 3.1.

It wasn't Microsoft, it was Compuserve back in 1987 in the days of 300 & 1200/75 baud modems. GIF87 was a very small format for quite a lot of picture data.

GIF is quite interesting. It uses a reduced RGB palette (max 256 colours), it includes lossless LZW compression (hence the problem with Burroughs/Unisys holding that patent).

I wrote a REXX program that generated a single pixel GIF. It's 26 bytes of data

Code: Select all

000000 47 49 46 38 39 61 01 00 01 00 00 ff 00 2c 00 00  >GIF89a.......,..<
000010 00 00 01 00 01 00 00 02 00 3b                    >.........;<
00001a

it was in a home grown web server that simply returned that GIF for every HTTP GET request (don't ask why).

[ethanol100]

Back to the original question, have you only changed the file extension in the capture command? You could need to set the format. Can you try to add format='gif' to the capture command?

[mikerr]

Don't use gif. That format is so very Windoze 3.1.

Yes gif is old and has a tiny 256 colour palette,
but is still the best supported format for small animations.
There's animated PNG variants, MNG and APNG but neither took off.
I don't see any point in GIFs for stills though.