Lottie is a file format for vector graphics animation, and is named after Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger, a German pioneer of silhouette animation.

Description

Lottie is based in

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and electronic data interchange, data interchange format that uses Human-readable medium and data, human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consi ...

but Lottie files use keys of 1–2 characters in length and are not readable by humans. It is intended as a lighter alternative to

animated GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

s and APNG files for use in the web and mobile and desktop applications. Being vectorial it is independent of the device resolution. It can also include raster graphic elements. It also allows for the inclusion of interactive elements. The different player implementations have tradeoffs between CPU, GPU and memory usage.

History

2015 - Hernan Torrisi released a plugin named ''Bodymovin'' for the animation software Adobe After Effects that serialized animations as JSON to be rendered at runtime. It supports some but not all of the features of the internal format of After Effects. Additionally, Torrisi released a renderer for the format with a JavaScript-based player for modern browsers. 2017 - it was the work of engineers Brandon Withrow (iOS), Gabriel Peal (Android), and Leland Richardson (React Native) along with lead animator Salih Abdul-Karim at AirBnB that saw the creation of the first Lottie libraries to render the animations in different platforms. Other companies have provided support for more platforms. 2018 -

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

and the .NET Foundation released a library for rendering Lottie on Windows. 2019 - further support for Lottie was by Qt with the release of a QML API for rendering Lottie. Later that same year, Samsung released rLottie which is a platform independent C++-based renderer for Lottie, and added Lottie support in Tizen. A Python framework to work with the format was also released this year. 2020 - dotLottie was created. This open-source file format combines multiple Lottie files and all their supporting resources into a single file. 2023
ThorVG
began to support the Lottie rendering feature. 2024 - The Lottie Animation Community has been established to standardize the file format. 2024 - The npm package ''lottie-player'', that allowed playing animations in hosting web pages, was temporarily compromised to insert code that targeted cryptocurrency holders.

Example

This code will produce a 512 pixel image of the above circle:

The dotLottie file format

In 2020, the dotLottie file format was proposed as a standard way to pack Lottie files with other resources. The file is actually a zip file compressed with the deflate method. It includes a manifest file and preview images to ease the manipulation of the files.

References

External links

* by the Lottie Animation Community
A Human's guide to the Lottie format
Extensive documentation of the format {{Animation-stub Computer-related introductions in 2015 2D animation software Vector graphics file formats Adobe software JSON