Taking part of an animated GIF

[theshim is the shimiest shim of all the shims that ever shim]

I've got practically no experience with image editing, so bear with me here.

I was just trying to take out only one potion of a larger, animated .gif file.  My question is, how do I get the layers to all copy over, so the smaller image is also animated, instead of just a static image of the first frame?

EDIT: For the record, I'm using GIMP to do stuff.

[♂♀]

First you'd probably want to extract the frames from the picture; I'd recommend Microsoft GIF Animator or Imageready if you have Adobe CS/CS2. Any programs which specifically edit GIF files will probably do. Then you need to use the said program and put back all the frames in order.

It might not be the easiest way, but it's pretty much a sure-fire method.

You'd get the Microsoft GIF Animator from the Spriting Resources topic, if the link is still alive. There's alot of other programs out there but this is the one that popped into my head while I was typing. : 3

[Ferry Fer the Dancing Queen of West New Orleens]

There's a plugin for GIMP called GAP that's designed to handle animation tasks but I've never used that and I don't think you need it anyways. I can't tell if by "portion" you mean a smaller area of the larger image, or a few frames from the overall animation, so here's how to do both:

Before you do anything, run Filters -> Animation -> Unoptimize on the image to reduce the possibility of weird things with layers happening. Then depending on what you want to do...

1. Take a subsection of a larger image: Use rectangular select to choose the part of the image you want, then Image -> Crop to Selection

2. Least complicated way I know how to do this is to just open up the Layers dialog and delete the frames you don't want.

After you're done you probably should run Filters -> Animation -> Optimize (for GIF) to save on filesize, then when saving the image as a GIF remember to check off the "Save as Animation" option that appears, and you should just be able to accept all default options on any other dialogs that pop up.