Ubuntu

Problem reading gif images

Asked by Mike K

Ubuntu 6.06
I received a disk with some images in gif format. Some opened after a very long time, others ... well, I just gave up. There was a lot of disk activity and I was unable to open System Monitor as whatever was going on was hogging the system. I hit the reset button to stop and reboot the computer, and then opened System Monitor before looking at the disk. I could see that my RAM (512kB) was immediately used up and my swap partition was starting to fill up. Hey! These images are measured in Megabytes, not Gigabytes. I tried the disk on a computer with Windows 2000 and they opened in a couple of seconds and without problems. Why does Ubuntu not like gif format?

Mike

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subliminalfix (na1tr2lp-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#1

did you use gimp to open the object?

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Mike K (emay-kirk) said : 		#2

I have looked a little deeper into this problem. Note that I now have 1Gb of memory. It is not just gif format, but also bmp and tif. I converted some of the gif files from the disk to bmp and tif using Windows and Irfanview and installed them on the hard disk and then opened them with Ubuntu/Gnome. It seems that the first time you do this the default icon (a watch on a sheet of paper) is converted into a miniature of the actual image. This took ages, used all my memory both RAM and Swap, and hogged the system. It was impossible to do anything else. With a couple of exceptions, the files I received on the disk were not all that big so I did some tests.

My old files (all bmp):
18 Mb photo took up 22Mb memory.
36 Mb photo took up 41 Mb memory.
36,7Mb line drawing took up 115 Mb memory.
30,4 Mb line drawing took up 95 Mb memory.

From the disk and converted to bmp:
18 Mb line drawing took up 57,7 Mb memory.
19,3 Mb line drawing took up 466 Mb memory!

It looks to me as if the amount of memory used by an image is not proportional to the file size in megabytes, but is related to the image size in pixels. All those drawings are very wide compared with their height. That last one which required 466 Mb is 22400 pixels wide. I also opened it with Gimp Image Editor. It was very slow but it required “only” 191 Mb of memory.

Mike

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subliminalfix (na1tr2lp-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#3

im really new to this but if your opening images with that amount of pixels and getting a reading of mb's theres is another problem that

hasnt been address.

sorry i dont know more to help but what i do know is the average gif or mpeg image or especially formatted bmp is alot smaller

for example ie 560 kb

or you need 10000 kb for a b and likewise for a mb and onto a gb

if your registering images that are inthe mb range they better be washing the dishes too

peace =]

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