How can I stop pillow from inserting a black frame into my animated gif

Question

I'm working on a program that takes an animated gif and return an asciified version of the gif as a different animated gif example

asciify(foo.gif)
bar.gif has been created

After I make the gif and open it there is always a black frame at the start of the animation that makes it pretty annoying to watch on a loop.

I've tried setting the alpha channel of the created gif to 0 and only appending ascii_image_gifs[1,-1] to the output gif and I have run out of ideas.

demonstration:

original gif: trippy circles

output gif: trippy ascii circles elongated

EDIT: I've just had a breakthrough! This line in gifify() is the culprit: save_as = Image.new('RGBA', (self._nw*3, self._nh*8), (0, 0, 0, 0))

If I change it to save_as = Image.new('RGBA', (self._nw*3, self._nh*8), 'white')

the black frame become white, so my question become: How do I ignore the image created by Image.new() when saving/creating the output image?

below is the program, the relevant function is gifify()

from PIL import Image, ImageFont, ImageDraw


__author__ = 'Nikolas'


ASCII_SHADING_CHARS = ['M', 'W', 'N', 'Q', 'B', 'H', 'K', 'R', '#', 'E', 'D', 'F', 'X', 'O', 'A', 'P', 'G', 'U', 'S',
                       'V', 'Z', 'Y', 'C', 'L', 'T', 'J', '$', 'I', '*', ':', '.', ' ']  # from darkest to lightest 32
#ASCII_SHADING_CHARS = ASCII_SHADING_CHARS[::-1]


class Asciify:
    def __init__(self, img, new_width=500):
        self.width, self.height = img.size  # image.size returns a 2 tuple (width, height) in pixels
        self._nw = new_width
        self._nh = int(new_width * self.height / self.width)
        self.im = img

    def grayify_and_resize(self):
        """
        Split the GIF into individual frames. Resize and convert each frame to monochrome.
        :returns: a list of resized black&white Image objects
        """

        new_width = self._nw
        new_height = self._nh
        num_frames = self.im.n_frames  # number of frames in the .gif animation
        result_list = []
        for i in range(0, num_frames - 1):
            # convert to mode L (b&w); resize to new dimensions
            result_list.append(self.im.convert('L').resize((int(new_width), new_height)))
            self.im.seek(self.im.tell() + 1)  # move to the next frame in the gif animation

        return result_list

    def ascii_map(self, im_list, color_width=int(255 / len(ASCII_SHADING_CHARS))):
        """
        Maps an ascii shading character to a pixel of each frame of the GIF
        :param im_list: a list of black and white Image objects
        :param color_width: determines the color intensity of each pixel
        :returns: a list of each frame of the gif converted to ascii pixels
        """

        ascii_image_list = []  # unformatted ascii images; needs to be broken into proper rows and columns
        result_list = []  # ascii_image_list broken into proper rows and columns; how convinient
        for image in im_list:
            pixels = image.getdata()  # color data on every pixel per image
            append_list = []  # temporary list to append to ascii_image_list
            for pixel_value in pixels:
                index = int(pixel_value // color_width)
                if index >= len(ASCII_SHADING_CHARS):
                    append_list.append(ASCII_SHADING_CHARS[-1])
                else:
                    append_list.append(ASCII_SHADING_CHARS[index])  # 'replace' pixel with ascii char
            ascii_image_list.append(append_list)  # adds an element to ascii_image_list containing every pixel for image

        for ascii_image in ascii_image_list:
            ascii_string = "".join(ascii_image)
            result_list.append([ascii_string[index:index + self._nw]
                                for index in range(0, len(ascii_string), self._nw)])

        return result_list

    def gifify(self, ascii_image_list):
        """
        Return the ascii strings to .gif format for use in a traditional image viewer.
        :param ascii_image_list: A list of ascii 'pixel' images
        :returns: None
        """

        # 7 = nw*4, nh*10
        # 5 = nw*3, nh*8
        font = ImageFont.truetype('ascii.ttf', 5)  # set font and font size
        ascii_image_strings = ['\n'.join(image) for image in ascii_image_list]
        ascii_image_gifs = []
        for image in ascii_image_strings:
            #print(image)
            if image == ascii_image_strings[0]:
                continue
            temp_image = Image.new('RGBA', (self._nw*3, self._nh*8), (255,255,255,0))  # should be transparent, didn't work
            image_draw = ImageDraw.Draw(temp_image)
            image_draw.text((0, 0), image, font=font, fill='black')
            temp_image.resize((self._nw, self._nh))
            ascii_image_gifs.append(temp_image)
            if image == ascii_image_strings[-1]:
                save_as = Image.new('RGBA', (self._nw*3, self._nh*8), (0, 0, 0, 0))  # should also be transparent, didn't work
                save_as.save('temp.gif', save_all=True, append_images=ascii_image_gifs, loop=0, fps=24)
                save_as.close()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    im = Image.open("trippy.gif")
    asciify_im = Asciify(im, 110)
    gif_list = asciify_im.grayify_and_resize()
    ascii_images = asciify_im.ascii_map(gif_list)
    asciify_im.gifify(ascii_images)

    # Debugging ascii image creation #
    # outfile = open("outfile.txt", 'w')
    # for image in ascii_images:
    #    outfile.write("\n".join(image) + '\n\n')

Answer 1

It feels as this parameter append_images=ascii_image_gifs is appending that list of images to an existing all black image.

You're 100% correct.

Calling image.save("test.gif", append_images=images) . Then image is the first frame and images is a list of all the extra/appended frames.

So instead, use images[0] as the first frame, and append the rest of the frames ( images[1:] ).

---

In your code save_as is the cause of the black frame. So instead remove that and only use ascii_image_gifs .

 ascii_image_gifs[0].save('temp.gif', save_all=True, append_images=ascii_image_gifs[1:], loop=0, fps=24)

It might be a bit convoluted, but that's how it works with PIL.