I just noticed that (in Maple 12) you can simply right-click on the animation and "Export As" a gif. That's a lot quicker than exporting as html and retrieving the gif from the folder (a method about which I read somewhere in mapleprimes, possibly about older versions of Maple). The gifs have the same size, so they are surely the same, whether exported directly as gif or via the html conversion. I should have noticed that earlier.

Thanks a lot to both of you, great update.

I did File --> Export As --> HTML and retrieved the gif from Paulina's example:

> animate(plot3d, [sin(x+t)*cos(y-t), x=0..2*Pi, y=0..2*Pi], t=0..Pi, frames=50);

The animation from within Maple is great. I can right-click, select "continuous" to loop the animation and select "slower" or "faster" to adjust the speed of the animation.

But the gif produced with the Maple --> HTML converter produces a gif that cycles through the frames at the highest speed by default. That's the problem I had.

I ought to have been clearer: the problem I had was not with "the number of frames contained within the gif" but with "the speed at which the gif displays the frames, however many there may be". In other words, I was looking for something like:

> animate(plot3d, [sin(x+t)*cos(y-t), x=0..2*Pi, y=0..2*Pi], t=0..Pi, frames=50, speed=1);

where "speed=1" indicates that each frame is to be displayed for 1 second. Just an example.

As remarked in one of the past messages in mapleprimes, if there were a free "MapleViewer.exe" that could fit on a USB flashdisk, there may be less of a need for creating gifs. The gifs are good to show in presentations or post on websites.