How to delete animations already committed to github, and then re-add them?

Adding dop2000 since I seem to remember you mentioning this in one of your posts...

I have an animation-heavy game (lots of sprites and frames). These animation slow down the game build process, and I only need a few during actual development, so I want to commit them to github, save them as .zip files using the animation editor, and then delete the local copies. Then, when I'm ready to release a new version, I want to re-add them to my game by loading the animation from the zip files.

At this point, my expectation is that github will recognize them as the same files and will not add them again. However, when I tested this with github, it re-added every frame of the deleted animations. So my git repository is getting bloated (I believe) -- right?

What's the best way to do this? I admit I don't really understand github too well...

Thanks

You've probably mistaken me for someone else. I've never done that.

I guess you can backup animations as zip files and temporarily replace them with dummies in your sprites. (or remove most frames)

But I'm not sure how github can help with this. When you are ready to release the game, you'll still have to manually re-import full animations.

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Another option is to work with a folder project.