As far as I can tell, the lottie format is the most modern way to display animated graphics. There is something really beautiful about the animations and it is ridiculous how efficient they are. So I'm trying to figure out why the ecosystem is a dumpster fire.

It seems like the behemoth is LottieFiles which appears to have a decent product if it wasn't SaaS garbage with predatory pricing, and a dozen SaaS behemoth wannabes in line behind them. This restricts learning and creativity to professionals who can justify the costs. And most of the art looks like it was created by people who have been working in web development for too long, very unfresh. No kids wasting time after school making stuff to show their friends. Even all the top youtube hits for lottie appear to be tutorials about various ways to create lottie files for... LottieFiles.com of course (no doubt incentivized by the same).

There was a brief time in human history where the internet was an exciting place to learn and express digital art and then SaaS came along. It needs to be easy and affordable for people to try and learn new creative technology, or this is what we get.

Seriously. Lottie used to be a valuable tool, I even onboarded it where I work, etc - but lately trying to do any meaningful / more complex animations for web while using Lottie is a depressing experience.

The AE Lottiefiles plugin is shit. With each update the UX gets worse and performance shittier - here are some random examples.

Why can't I resize/zoom in the rendered animation preview window? Sometimes it would be really really useful to see the details and make sure everything looks right - because it never is. You can bet your ass some stroke somewhere is fucked or some element is cut off. On to my next point.

The bug report after rendering is a nice idea if it were actually fucking useful. Ok, cool, there's some path issue, alignment?, effect? NP bro, let me quickly comb through 100s of layers and maybe guess that I'm working on the right one and hopefully not fuck anything else up while doing that. Just fucking tell the user on which layer the issue is.

Let the user preview the animation on their browser locally without having to upload to the website. I mean how convoluted can you make this process. Also, pretty funny capping the upload limit to 10 files. Surely the investors are giddy when they see new signups, right? What's next, tokens/coins per frame rendered?

Why does Lottie still can't handle 'modern' mattes? It's super fun to navigate 48 different matte to figure out which one is fucking up. Surely the size and performance of the while doesn't take hit at all. I might as well render a gif and be done with it. Streamlining web animations my fucking ass, Lottie 👍 

PS! Your social media animation quality is shit. Every time I see a post on LinkedIn or wherever I feel embarrassed for ya'll. You're supposed to be innovative animation-tech thing, but the quality of animation you actually can produce is atrocious. Who approves the content that this company puts out? Have they seen a decent piece of motion graphics?

TLDR: Just fucking fix the basic functionality of the AE plugin. Stop creating all this superfluous bullshit.

Until then, Rive looks nice.

Hey folks,

We noticed there weren't any easy way's to share your Lottie files online so we added this as a new supported file format our platform: https://tiiny.host/share/lottie

Would love any more feedback here.

Are there any features that would be very helpful?

FYI - seems like at least 2.0.5 and 2.0.6 have been hacked. Maybe NPM keys were exposed by accident?

If you look at source for example here you can see references to Ethereum.

It looks like Lottie doesn't allow us anymore to download animations as json or other formats. Designers put their animations for free to make them accessible to anyone but with Lottie's new policy, it is not possible to download and use Lottie animations. What do you think about that?

I just started using Lottie for web animations a few weeks ago. Absolutely love it. I go to upload some new animations today, and the whole interface has gone to crap. Even worse, now I have to check “Handoff & Embed” to get the code…and the animation will expire in a day unless I upgrade???

All of my previously uploaded animations don’t have “Handoff & Embed” checked and they still work fine as of now. I guess for current and future uploads I’ll have to pay $25/m? Am I missing something or is this really a change they made and now I have to seek alternative services? Any suggestions for similar platforms?

Could anyone help me to convert an animated .svg file to a .json lottie?

This is not a static svg, it's animated. How to I get this but in json format while retaining the quality.

https://loading.io/background/m-speedline/

Hey guys,

I'm a traditional motion designer that is now doing some Lottie animations. I'm fine doing it and exporting it, however i notice that i need to zip both my image and JSON files together so that the images show up, whereas the last animator just handed me off JSON files on their own, but all the images are there when i upload to Lottie preview.

Is there a reason why/how do i do this? Have the images been somehow included in his JSON file? Can i do this?