The trick with the TFP avatars is A)100 x 100 which isnt that much of an issue aside from loosing a little clarity (with any avatar) and B) the challege: take a gif animated creation and get it narrowed down to just under 20k. Ive found that anything 19.70 and over will kick it back at you.
Ulead gif maker is good. I still like image ready for quick gif animation manipulation the best. It comes with photoshop, and when you right click an animation you see somewhere on the net you can open it frame by frame animation in image ready. The first order is to reduce it down to 100x100 just clicking on image then image size. That will knock down the size of the file. If they are video gifs or colorful you can start knocking down the amount of color from 256-128-64 so on anything past 8 will generally be black and white though. if you get to 8 and its still too big then you have to start knocking frames out. To make the animation even I'll go through the entire frame sequence and knock out all the odds or evens. That begins minimizing by 50% each time. THen you put the frame rate at the desired timing and shaaaabooom.
This one orginally started at 320x260 was colored at 256 and had a file size of 175k. Now its 100x100, 8 colors, and should be at an even 19 using the above method.
PS . . . . . . kazaalite er emmm
