GIMP Version: 2.8.10
Operating System: Windows
GIMP Experience: Beginner Level

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I have made an animation in GIMP that I exported to a gif file, but whenever I open the exported gif in windows media player or irfanview, the quality is really bad..
Before exporting I first convert the animation to indexed colors, and then optimize the animation to reduce the file size when exporting.

How it looks in GIMP


When opening with windows media player


And it's even worse in irfanview..


Any ideas on how to solve this?

I'm not sure but it could be a semi-transparent issue with the GIF.
Have a look, GIF: Semi-transparency, Antialiasing, Semi-Flattening

Looks like a colormap problem... Can you share two of the frames of the GIF with us: load GIF in GIMP (should be indexed-color image), remove all frames but two, save as animated GIF?

Inside GIMP, you are viewing the animation at a high color depth. When exporting to .gif, you drop to only 256 colors, which markedly degrades the gradients.

You would have to convert to APN, WebP or a video format like MPG or AVI to maintain the color depth you see in GIMP.

____GIF________APNG____

According to the screenshot she is looking at the color-indexed image.


A middle-of-the-road solution exists: export as a bunch PNGs and convert to a more recent versoin of the GIF format that supports one colormap per frame (instead of Gimp's colormap shared between frames).

Tux, pleaSE, how can I convert to APN, WebP or a video format like MPG or AVI to maintain the color depth you see in GIMP?

There is a plug-in for GIMP which saves as an APNG. I don't have it installed at the moment but I'd imagine that it still works. APNG produces really big files.

For WebP, you'll need to export the animation as a series of PNG or JPG files and combine them with a 3rd party app. You can do the same for creating MPG or AVI files or you can use Video Encoder that comes with GIMP GAP (GIMP Animation Plug-in) .

Source Code

I think I know what causes the gradients to be all messed up. Whenever I open the exported file in GIMP, the quality is the same as before exporting, but when I scale the image down then I get the same effect as when I open it with windows media player. And because the resolution of the image is 3500x2334 pixels, windows media player or irfanview has to scale it down to be able to see the whole image, if that makes sense.
Not sure if there's something to do about it though

ofnuts:
Here are two frames, and it looks like the quality didn't get worse!


Gnutux:
The first image you see is already converted to 256 colors with dithering enabled, so the colors should remain the same after exporting.
And I'd like to export to APNG or something different, but not everyone supports APNG with uploading.. Deviantart for example, at least not that I know of

Same problem with Gwenview. Scaling down generates a lot of aliasing in the sky.

It seems you used a rather geometric/periodic dithering and this may be part of the problem. The "positioned" dithering is more random and could be more resilient to scaling.

Thanks, Tux.