Technically a gif can have up to 256 colors per frame, but photoshop and gimp only support a global color palette (256 colors for the whole image)
What I did was make three separate gifs in gimp (one for each keyframe) and combine them using gifsicle, which preserves each of the 3 palettes
Even IE supports gifs like this, I don't know why PS doesn't
I would also like to apologize for not being able to support this gif and this gif. It is due to a bug in java's GIFImageReader class and at the moment there is not much I can do. If anyone has a fix I'd love to hear it, but unfortunately the only work around is to unoptimize it using photoshop or using this. Note that most optimized gifs are supported. This is a bug in Java's built in library, so it is difficult to fix myself.
Using Gifsicle I was able to shave off another 140kB without changing the quality: http://i.imgur.com/fM6R5eI.gif
gifsicle -O3 53bc3a6848.gif > smaller.gif
I don't have too much experience with third party apps, but you want one that takes in account the similarities between frames (an example would be Gifsicle). There are also several online services you could try. A search fro "optimize gif" should get you in the right direction.
Well, I don't know if Photoshop has an internal limit for compatibility reasons or something. I edited the GIF directly using Gifsicle and set the delay for each frame to 2ms. 1ms (=100fps) is theoretically possible as well, but virtually no browser supports it.
I don't know how comfortable you are with scripting, but there's a free tool called gifsicle that I've tested running over a few of your gifs, and it's able to cut down up to about 10% of the filesize with no loss of image quality. Specifically the option "-O=3". You can get longer gifs at the same filesize, or just help save bandwidth.
I've found giphy to be very effective if size is a concern. Photoshop works OK but it takes a lot of work to optimize it.
IIRC This worked well for me, but you'll need some command line knowledge to use it: http://www.lcdf.org/gifsicle/
I've struggled with the same issues, Gif's aren't very well supported these days...
Here y' go. Slowed down to 1/4 speed.
If you want to mess with gifs like this, get gifsicle. This was as simple as grabbing the gif, using gifsicle -I to find out the frame delay, then doing
gifsicle -b -d10 -i um53ncA.gif
et voilà.
gifview comes with gifsicle and can view GIF's frame by frame using :
Space or n Go to the next frame.
b or p Go to the previous frame.
ESC Stop the animation.
u Toggle between normal and unoptimized mode. you can also use the mouse to right-click and go to the next frame.
Photoshop isn't doing the transparency optimization as well as a tool like gifsicle will. PS is damned good, but it's not the absolute best at transparency optimization.
To make the image smaller I installed and used a command line optimization program called gifsicle. The command line can seem intimidating, but it's really not, just another process to learn.
I tired my usual tricks in PS, and nothing short of making the image size 400px wide and changing the dither type worked well. This method only required me to reduce to colors (which you can see the effect of in the first part on his neck) but overall I was surprised at how much quality it retained.
5/5, would use gifsicle again.
Well, gif-explode.com isn't suitable to analyze how a GIF was optimized, because it re-assembles the frames and shows them in the same way as the browser, just as single images.
If you're not afraid to use command-line programs, Gifsicle is a great program to analyze GIFs locally on your own PC. Here are two ways to do that:
gifsicle -b zWBcPJh.gif --disposal=bg "#0--1"
Frames don't "merge" anymore and are displayed individually.
gifsicle -b zWBcPJh.gif --delete "#0"
Removes the first frame so that all other frames accumulate on transparency.
I usually combine both methods in that order to analyze a GIF. Maybe I could even write a little web application in a similar fashion like gif-explode.com using that method, I'm just not sure if my little server can handle the traffic in case it becomes popular. :P