Hi everyone,
I’ve been having a strange issue with animated GIFs in Facer Creator lately, and it’s happening consistently with new watchfaces I’m making.
When I add a GIF, it doesn’t behave correctly, the first frame stays visible as a static image on top, while the other frames play behind it. So instead of a smooth animation, it looks like a still image overlapping the movement underneath.
I’ve already tested several things:
- Re-exported the GIF in GIMP with Replace every frame enabled.
- Tried disabling optimization.
- Renamed and re-uploaded the file to avoid caching.
- Tested both in the Creator preview and on the actual watch.
The issue persists in both places.
What’s weird is that older watchfaces I made with GIFs still display normally — this only happens with new uploads.
It feels like something in the Creator’s GIF handling changed recently, maybe related to frame disposal or transparency rendering.
If anyone from the Facer team or other creators has found a workaround or can confirm the same behavior, that would help a lot.
Thanks in advance!
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Is this issue affecting All Gifs you’re trying to use, or just one in particular? Could you share the Gif with us so we could check it out please?
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@FilthyMcNasty As a test have you tried a test of importing the Gif frame by frame . You don’t have to bring them one by one you can select the 25 or under images at once . Make sure you select Trigger on Wake . Trigger on sync is a NOP. Make sure the GIF is not a Large memory load . As @icrltd4 says . Let us see it . I think the Recent update to Facer Creator is a little more fussy . Let us see .
Yes, it’s affecting all the GIFs I’ve tried recently, not just one. However, I’ll share one of them here so you can check it out.
In this example, the animation has 6 frames, but when I preview it in the Creator, only the first frame remains static on top while the rest of the frames animate behind it — as if a still image was covering the animation.
When I post this reply, the GIF looks fine here, but in Facer Creator it appears like a static image (the 1st frame) on top of the moving animation.
This is the current watchface where I’m having the issue:
I also noticed something important: the issue only happens inside the Creator mode when editing.
If I open an existing watchface that was published months ago, the GIFs display correctly on both the watch and the preview.
However, when I enter edit mode in the Creator, the same GIFs that used to work fine now show the issue — the first frame stays static on top while the others animate behind it.
So it’s not related to a specific GIF; it happens with all of them when editing.
As long as I don’t update those older watchfaces, they still work fine, but any new project or edit shows this problem.
Please take a look and let me know if you can find something that I might have missed. Hope this helps you identify the cause.
I just tested importing the animation frame by frame (under 25 images, Trigger on Wake), but unfortunately, the same thing happens. The first frame still appears as a static image on top, while the animation plays behind it.
So it’s not related to the GIF format or memory load — even when added frame by frame, the issue persists.
As you can see, the first frame stays active the entire time, while the other frames keep animating behind it. (a bit laggy, but it flows in the correct order, exept the first one)
This makes me think it’s definitely something with the latest Creator update, since older projects that I haven’t touched still display perfectly.
Let me know if you’d like me to share another short example project to help you reproduce it.