What is the process for putting animations into questions and answers on stackexchange?

Question

Some answers have nice animations, for example. I have been looking round meta to get guidance on how to post animations and not found any. Is there a post on how to do this?

Edit

Thanks to Szabolcs we now have a nice tutorial. The bit that fooled me for a while is the need to have the full definition of the gif i.e (from below).

Export["~/Desktop/animation.gif", frames, "GIF", 
 AnimationRepetitions -> Infinity, "AnimationDurations" -> 1/20]

I tried without the AnimationRepetitions-> Infinity and just got two shows.

Further, a minor point but again had me fooled, is to use the image inserter on the toolbar. This puts a complicated reference e.g.

[![fig1][1]][1]

as a placeholder for the video and an even more complicated reference e.g.

[1]: https://i.sstatic.net/UsRkK.gif

at the end of the post. Thanks for all your help. I guess we can't automate this onto the SE Uploader...

Answer 1

I think it is useful to have a tutorial for those who are less familiar with this topic. So here it goes.

---

Most animations you see here are animated GIF files. Once you have created the GIF file, it can be posted the same way as any other image.

Mathematica can export animated GIFs. Here is one example:

vp = OptionValue[Graphics3D, ViewPoint]
(* {1.3, -2.4, 2.} *)

frames = Table[
   Plot3D[Sin[x] Cos[y], {x, -5, 5}, {y, -5, 5}, SphericalRegion -> True, 
    ViewPoint -> RotationTransform[theta, {0, 0, 1}][vp]],
   {theta, 0., 2 Pi - 2 Pi/60, Pi/60}
   ];

Before you export the frames, you can preview them with ListAnimate.

Export["~/Desktop/animation.gif", frames, "GIF", 
 AnimationRepetitions -> Infinity, "AnimationDurations" -> 1/20]

---

GIF files are often very large. StackExchange has a 2 MB limit on images. If that is not enough, Google for "GIF optimizer" and use one of the many online services to reduce the file size. For the above animation, I used https://ezgif.com/

---

A different method to create animated GIFs is to create a screen recording. I use LICEcap for this.

Here's an example: