MNG-supporting Image Editors

Image and Animation/Video Editors with MNG Support

For the purposes of this page, an "image editor" is defined as a paint or drawing program that supports pixel-level editing (or the equivalent). As a general rule of thumb, if it's got a pencil or paint-brush tool, it's in; if it supplies only "algorithms" (such as sharpening, blurring, edge-detection, cropping, etc.), it's not. See the Image Converters page for applications in the latter class.

Animation- and video-editing applications may or may not support low-level editing; they are characterized more by the ability to arrange and store frames, set delay intervals and transitions, and so forth.

All known MNG-supporting image editors are listed here, but Greg doesn't always hear about new ones right away. So if you don't see something here, also check Gerard Juyn's MNG application pages, particularly these:

generic MNG-supporting applications
Japanese MNG-supporting applications (and advocacy sites)

As with the PNG-applications pages, links to home WWW sites or to downloadable versions are provided where known. But if a link is broken, check the location and see if the page moved or if an updated version is available (and please tell Greg!). Relevant operating systems are printed in (parenthesized italics).

These are listed alphabetically, more or less:

Ameri-Imager [ThinkTank Software] (Win32) - version 2.0(?) and later; read/write? commercial. (This is an image and video editor with PNG and MNG support.)
Animai [SOGEN] (Win32) - all versions; read/write? uses libmng; freeware. (This is a MNG-specific animation editor.)
Animation Shop [Jasc / Corel] (Win32) - version 1.0 and later; read/write/edit; conforms to (older) frozen version of MNG specification as of version 2.01, and almost conforms to MNG-LC 0.97 as of version 3.0; stores invalid TERM chunk in some cases; commercial. (Animation Shop is [or was] bundled with Paint Shop Pro; AS 1.0 was included with PSP 5.0, AS 2.0 with PSP 6.0, and AS 3.0 with PSP 7.0 and 8.0. MNG is Animation Shop's native format. Version 3.0, released 21 September 2000, is claimed to conform to the current MNG-LC specification. Unfortunately, it will try to read almost any MNG, no matter how complex, effectively destroying those it doesn't fully understand [and violating the spec], and it creates invalid MNGs that don't display correctly in some other MNG-supporting applications [see FixMNG on the converters page]. Also, it grabs the .mng file association without asking.)
eMNGma [Triple-T Software] (Win32) - all versions; read/write/edit; freeware(adware) / shareware. (This is a MNG editor/`animation shop.' Its interface is considerably more automated and easy to use than the manual editing facilities built into MNGeye below. This product is no longer officially available, but the author may be contacted for further information, and the free/adware version [EMF200en.exe, 2,349,152 bytes] reportedly can be found on P2P networks via eMule.)
Giam [Tsuyoshi Furumizo (古溝剛)] (Win32) - version 1.20p and later; read/write; MNG-LC support (but attempts [and fails] to open and edit more complex MNG streams); uses libpng and zlib? freeware. (This is a viewer and editor of multiple animation types. An automated English translation is available via Babelfish.)
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) [Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and many others] (Unix/GTK+, Win32, OS/2, Mac OS X) - version 1.3.14 and later; write-only (MNG only, although a separate plug-in by Frank Richter exists in the GIMP plug-in registry and reportedly can read JNG images); full alpha support; requires libmng, libjpeg, libpng and zlib; freeware (GPL) with source. (GIMP is a "free Photoshop-like image editor for X11" and other GUIs, with built-in PNG and MNG support. Note that there is also a GIMP Animation Package [a.k.a. GIMP-GAP] for doing frame-based animations.)
Gserver [Gábor Szántó] (Win32) - all versions; write-only; freeware. (This is a remote-computing / remote-control application, somewhat similar to PC Anywhere. It allows any PNG- or MNG-supporting web browser to view and control the Windows system running Gserver. Single screenshots are made available as PNG images, and continuously updated views are sent as MNG streams. Gserver is reported to be compatible with MSIE 4.x and 5.x with Jason Summers' MNGPLG [below] and with Netscape 6.01 [but not 6.0] natively. This product is no longer available.)
MNGEdit [Naoyuki Hirayama (平山直之)] (Win32) - all versions; read/write; requires VAFX, updated VAXFMNGA (included on MNGEdit page in MNGTools.lzh), libpng and zlib; freeware with source. (This is a MNG editor that can create animations out of multiple PNGs, presumably conforming to the MNG-VLC or MNG-LC specification. A viewer, MNGBrowser, is also included. The code hasn't been updated since early February 2000, so it may not fully conform to the current MNG spec; but since the C++ sources are provided, fixing any such problems should be simple. See also Babelfish's automated English translation.)
MNGeye [Triple-T Software] (Win32) - all versions; read/write/edit as of August 1998; freeware with Pascal source. (This is an image-viewer/editor for PNG and MNG, including JNG support in version 1.1 and later. Version 1.31 is current as of MNG Draft 69 [frozen]. See also eMNGma above. This product is no longer available except via CVS at SourceForge. The author may be contacted for further information.)
Paint Shop Pro - see Animation Shop above
Photoshop [Adobe] (Win32) - version 7.0 and later with Tassilo Philipp's JNG plug-in; read/write (JNG only); full 32-bit alpha support; commercial (but plug-in is freeware).
PNG/MNG Construction Set Professional [Alchemy Mindworks] (Win32) - all versions; read/write; full(?) alpha support; commercial. (This tool, the PNG/MNG equivalent of GIF Construction Set above, can be used to add alpha transparency to PNG images as well as to create, modify, and optimize MNG animations.)
Video Toaster [NewTek] (Win32) - version [2] build 3480i and later; read-only? commercial. (This product is no longer available. This was a well-known video-editing application, originally written for the Amiga.)
WinImages [Black Belt Systems] (Win32) - version R6 and later; write-only; commercial. (This is more of a special-effects and animation studio than a "normal" image editor. Read support is likely to appear in a maintenance update.)

Here are some related MNG pages at this site:

Last modified 14 March 2009.