I am trying to create a manageable-sized CDF document that shows a sequence of related graphs. The individual graphs take too long to create individually in a CDF document and so I’ve created those separately in Mathematica and exported those to png files. In Mathematica I just read those in and display those using a slider with Manipulate.

Attempting to save the notebook as a CDF document with “SaveDefinitions -> True” either takes forever or produces a CDF document that is several hundred megabytes in size.

I’m looking for a way to produce smaller sized CDF documents. My graphs can be exported to an animated gif which is much smaller in size and contains all of the information needed. (When I import that gif file the individual frames are produced with no problem.)

So to finally get to my question: Is there a way to keep the gif file intact when importing (or create the animated gif without exporting) and extract the individual frames in the Initialization section of Manipulate? My hope is that this would speed things up and make for a much, much smaller CDF document.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.