Opening files with PhotoGIF‚Ñ¢ takes no special action from the finder. Simply double-click on or drag a GIF file onto Photoshop, and PhotoGIF‚Ñ¢ will be used as the default method for opening all GIF files. There is no user control over this behavior, and there are no variants of GIF files that PhotoGIF‚Ñ¢ cannot open.
PhotoGIF‚Ñ¢ automatically determines if a GIF file contains one or multiple images. If the file is a single image GIF file, no additional user input is required, and the file is opened directly into Photoshop without any dialogs being presented. However, if PhotoGIF‚Ñ¢ determines that the file being opened contains multiple images, additional input is required before the file can be opened, and the multiple image open options dialog is presented.
The multiple image open options dialog allows you to specify the mode in which you would like to edit the multiple image file. There are four editing modes available, each having its specific advantages for working with multiple image GIF animation files.
The first mode ‘Edit single image...’ allows you to directly edit one image within a multiple image GIF animation file while maintaining the integrity of the multiple image structure of the original file. If you select ‘Edit single image...’ as the editing mode, an additional dialog, the open image picker, will be displayed after the multiple image open options dialog so you can select which image from the multiple image GIF animation file to open.
The second mode ‘Edit cell-strip’ is most useful for viewing all the images within a multiple image GIF animation file at the same time. It is not suitable for editing animations, unless all the images within the animation are the same size as the logical screen size of the multiple image GIF animation file. If any of the images within the multiple image GIF animation file are smaller than the logical screen size of the multiple image GIF animation file, reserving the file from ‘Edit cell strip’ mode will increase the size of the file, because the images smaller than the logical screen size will be increased in size by filling the area between the image size and the logical screen size with the GIF background color. You can view either vertically or horizontally in ‘Edit cell-strip’ mode.
 
The third mode ‘Extract single image...’ allows you to extract a copy of a single image contained within a multiple image GIF animation file to edit. The original file will be left unaltered and a new single image GIF file will be created and opened into Photoshop for editing. The new file created is automatically named with the original file name and the sequential number of the image being extracted. If a file already exists with this name, PhotoGIF™ will return an error. If you select ‘Extract single image...’ as the editing mode, an additional dialog, the open image picker, will be displayed after the multiple image open options dialog so you can select which image from the multiple image GIF animation file to extract.
The fourth and last editing mode, ‘Extract all images’ operates in much the same way as ‘Extract single image...’ except that all images are extracted into new single image GIF files and then opened into Photoshop for editing. The new files created are automatically named with the original file name and the sequential number of the image contained in each new file. If a file already exists with the same name as PhotoGIF™ tries to assign to a new file, PhotoGIF™ will return an error and will not extract the corresponding image from the multiple image GIF animation file. The original multiple image GIF animation file is not altered.
