Well, I ended up deciding to punt on using Photoshop. After downloading JASC's Animation Shop and seeing how comparitively easy it was to generate an animation from stills, I decided to use that. However, I was going to continue using Photoshop to "optimize" each file to get the size down to something reasonable. But even the stupid Optimize thing doesn't make any sense! I imported a file to Image Ready and hit the "4-up" tab to get a variety of "optimized" images. The first hint that something was screwy was when IR said the original file was 540 kB (it's actually 1 MB). So then I select the most-reduced option, which supposedly is a 14.5 kB file, and save it. When I check the actual file size, it's now 4.05 MB! WTF? I "optimize" an image and it quadruples in size?? At that point, I threw up my hands in disgust, opened up the Microsoft Photo Editor and resized it there, which turned a 1 MB jpeg into a 20 kB jpeg. Did that for all 36 frames, slapped 'em into Animation Shop, and whammo, I got a cool-ass animated GIF that's 2.5 MB in size.

So anyway, thanks for all the tips guys, but that program blows .

 

Well done. Cool