Merging a still image and a gif

[lucynakamura]

hi all,

I've been at this for days, trying to figure this out for hours and hours scouring all over the internet and I cannot for the life of me figure out what I am doing wrong. 

Basically, I am trying to create a silly gif with an image of a cat and two wings attached to either side of the image. The wings are animated (gif), and are both part of a single gif, so not separate. When I first tried doing this I quickly found out that whenever I export the cat only shows up at the very end, so I tried to figure out why. It's got to do with the layers, and every step of the way I found a plugin called ofn interleave layers being linked but at first I tried to avoid it since I couldn't figure out how to download it. 

The cat in the middle is the image, the wings are the gif/animated part. 

It quickly became apparent that I did need it, so I relented and downloaded it and put it in my plugin folder according to the instructions given (Filters->Development->Python-fu->console and then got the plugin folder.

I then pasted the contents in the plugin folder it gave me like so  

Restarting Gimp that didn't do the trick, so I then created a subfolder, which also did not work. I then saw that gimphelpers.py might be needed and installed that, which also changed nothing. I use Gimp 3.0 and Windows 11.  

What I thought was a very simple and quick creation has turned into a multiple days long affair, and at this point I'm more frustrated that I can't seem to figure out how to make this work rather than actually getting the result. I am sorry if this isn't the right place but I truly am at a loss of what I am doing wrong at this point. 

Please don't assume I know anything when you reply, I am very new to Gimp and I know like nothing about Python. Assume I am an idiot (I am) 

[lucynakamura]

Messed up the images, hopefully they work now

[rich2005]

(Just a moan, why is it difficult to find an animated gif of wings without being pestered to sign up...web never used to be like that..)

First a little check list for everyone.
If the gif is optimised then unoptimise it:  Filters -> Animation -> Unoptimise.  (your layers look ok but do check)
A gif uses indexed color, change to RGB :   Image -> Mode RGB

Ofnuts plugin is contained inside the folder, no need for moving the files.  A Gimp 3 plugin (scm or py) requires the plugin inside a folder of the same name (without extension) For example the flatten-groups-0.0.py goes in a folder flatten-groups-0.0

   

Using Interleave Layers. Look at the help file provided.
The overlay image can be a different size to the base animation but for fixing position make the layer same size as the animation. Layer -> Layer to image size.
For the plugin to work, you have to select the layers. Click select top layer - go to bottom layer and shift-click
Now apply the plugin Image -> Interleave Layers -> Interleave Single Layer.  Browse for the image - Position=Over and OK.

This a 1 minute video of that (no audio) https://sendvid.com/ywt8n4pm and the resulting gif

   

[AllenM]

To put it simply, a GIF is just a stack of layers acting as frames. You need your cat image to be duplicated across every single frame of the animation, which is exactly what the Interleave Layers plugin does. Just make sure you select all your layers before running the plugin - click the top one, then Shift+click the bottom one to highlight the whole stack

[lucynakamura]

First of all, thank you for the detailed reply, especially with a video and images attached to it!

I have tried to follow your exact steps, (also unoptimized the animation) and also made sure that my layers more or less looked the exact same as yours. (Image on top, frames at the bottom). When I replicate your steps though, I do not get a popup for interleave layers at all. I've created a video of my own to show what the plugins folder looks like, based on your instructions. Not sure what is going wrong here... :/ 

https://sendvid.com/3qed4bmu <- video