How can I create animated GIF images in MATLAB ?

Asked by MathWorks Support Team on 27 Jun 2009

Latest activity Edited by Chad Greene on 17 Oct 2018

Accepted Answer by MathWorks Support Team

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I would like to know if there is MATLAB functionality to create an animated GIF in MATLAB.

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Answer by MathWorks Support Team on 12 Jun 2017

Accepted Answer

Use the 'imwrite' function to create an animated GIF. An animated GIF contains a series of images all combined into one file. For this example,

1. Draw a series of plots for the function y = x^n for different values of n

2. Capture them as images

3. Write them into a GIF file

h = figure;
axis tight manual % this ensures that getframe() returns a consistent size
filename = 'testAnimated.gif';
for n = 1:0.5:5
    % Draw plot for y = x.^n
    x = 0:0.01:1;
    y = x.^n;
    plot(x,y) 
    drawnow 
      % Capture the plot as an image 
      frame = getframe(h); 
      im = frame2im(frame); 
      [imind,cm] = rgb2ind(im,256); 
      % Write to the GIF File 
      if n == 1 
          imwrite(imind,cm,filename,'gif', 'Loopcount',inf); 
      else 
          imwrite(imind,cm,filename,'gif','WriteMode','append'); 
      end 
  end

For a more detailed description on creating an animated GIF File, see the example “Write Animated GIF” on the 'imwrite' function reference page:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/imwrite.html#btv452g-1

4 Comments

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Chad Greene on 20 Jul 2017

Royi has a good point!

Michael Abboud on 1 Aug 2017

That's a good suggestion, thanks for commenting! I have submitted an enhancement request for this functionality, so it may be considered for a future release of MATLAB.

Michael Chan on 15 Oct 2018

Very useful and easy to modify. Thanks a lot.

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Answer by Chad Greene on 4 Jun 2017

Or, for a much simpler option, use the gif function on File Exchange.

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Answer by Alec on 19 Dec 2013

So it appears that `imwrite` now supports writing animated grayscale GIFs "When writing multiframe GIF images, X should be an 4-dimensional M-by-N-by-1-by-P array, where P is the number of frames to write."

But if I try to pass it an M-by-N-by-3-by-P it seems to treat each RGB color channel as a separate grayscale frame. Is there now way to write an animated color GIF without a for loop over the frames?

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Answer by Shashank Rai on 1 May 2017

Edited by Chad Greene on 17 Oct 2018

x = 0:0.01:1;
figure(1)
filename = 'testnew51.gif';
for n = 1:0.5:5
      y = x.^n;
      plot(x,y)
      drawnow
      frame = getframe(1);
      im = frame2im(frame);
      [imind,cm] = rgb2ind(im,256);
      if n == 1;
          imwrite(imind,cm,filename,'gif', 'Loopcount',inf);
      else
          imwrite(imind,cm,filename,'gif','WriteMode','append');
      end
end

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