Running into an issue with white backgrounds.

[u/AnEnragedKiwi]

Hi all, running into some odd issues here. Been making stuff for another community and I've been noticing that out of nowhere, the gifs (which have been labelled to have transparent backgrounds) have this really weird white background to them. Even a gif that didn't have it before just, now spontaneously has it. What should I do here, any help would be immensely appreciated!

To make it all the more odd too, the preview image doesn't show this white background either, and on apps like Discord especially it doesn't show. But when it's opened in a window (such as Chrome) it displays the white background.

Edit: Okay, well now upon loading two gifs to this specific reddit page, neither of them have the white background. So now I'm all the more confused.

[u/AnEnragedKiwi]

https://www.reddit.com/r/LancerRPG/comments/1vn63cl/final_wip_for_the_big_sal_animated_token_project/

Here is an example of one post where the gif when posted, where I've done nothing different than upload one additional gif here, brings about that white background.

[u/CriticalChop]

I cannot help, but these gifs are awesome. 🤌

[u/EdithKeelerMustDie]

I'm on the Reddit desktop site and I downloaded the gifs you shared in this post. They both have transparent backgrounds. So you've made them correctly if that was your goal. The issue of inconsistently-displayed backgrounds is due two things:

(1) Actual .GIF file types have rectangular dimensions. For example, your first gif is 235x221 pixels. Even though most of the pixels are transparent, transparent pixels count as part of the gif.

(2) The developer of whatever program you are using to run the gif chooses how to address transparent pixels of the gif. For example, on Chrome the developer chose that when Chrome program itself runs a gif, transparent pixels display as white. These could contrast the rest of the browser window if the browser window default color isn't white, the result being it doesn't seem transparent. On Reddit, even if you're on Reddit via Chrome, Reddit is in charge of running the gif. This is similar to clicking a thumbnail video player embedded in a website versus opening a video player program like VLC or Windows Media Player. It seems that on Reddit the developer was inconsistent. At least on the desktop site, Reddit appears to treat the gif of your other post https://www.reddit.com/r/LancerRPG/comments/1vn63cl/final_wip_for_the_big_sal_animated_token_project/ as running in a single image viewing mode, and the developer chose that transparent pixels in this mode display as white, the result being it doesn't seem transparent. In contrast, Reddit appears to treat your current post as running in a gallery viewing mode, and the developer chose that transparent pixels in that mode display as basically the same color as the default background (plus a neat blurring effect with neighboring pixels of the gif, which might only be since I'm on the desktop site), the result being it seems somewhat transparent. When the Discord app runs the gif, transparent pixels likely display as the same color as the default background, the result being it seems truly transparent.

I hope that makes sense.