I've been using photoshop to make animated .gif files that I upload to my Myspace page with the intent of using them as my avatar. For some reason, some of them turn out fine and some look very grainy. I've tried playing with dither, color count, and countless other settings. Does anyone have any advise? Here is a link to the photo album in Myspace so you can see the problem for itself:
http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.editAlbumPhotos&albumID=1186659

link is not working for me.

I remember making an animated gif for an av on myspace and finding problems when myspace converted it over to the different av sizes it uses throughout.

The problem seemed to be the compression it was calculating due to the way I had my layers set up. Basically, I'd have a background layer with my kid in the shot, and on another layer I had my kids shirt animated to move up and down to look like he was dancing. So technically I had at least 2 layers showing at all times during the animation. When uploading to Myspace, it garbled it up where the layers were moving around.

I fixed it by creating single flattened layers of each animated frame and then created the gif. So now only 1 layer is showing at a time, and never 2 layers being shown at the same time. This seemed to eliminate the garble/noise myspace created when it recompressed the upload.

I don't know what the difference in the final gif is that photoshop creates because you'd think they'd essentially be the same thing. But somehow some kind of layer information is embedded within the final gif if you create a gif showing multiple frames at any instant.

Hope you understand. I select all, copy merged, then paste to a new layer for each frame I want in the animation. Then when creating the gif, only one flattened layer is seen per frame.

Oops. Here's the right link....
http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=406263332&albumId=1186659

I totally understand. Thanks for the tip! I'll try it and let ya know.

AHA!! I tried condensing all of the layers and, while it improved it slightly, the image was still very grainy. I played with some controls and kept uploading it until it was fixed. The "color reduction" was set to "restrictive" but when I changed it to "perceptual" it smooths out and looks perfect.

Thanks for your quick replies