How do I make animated GIFs?

Question

How do I make animated GIFs?

Answer 1

Gimp

• http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Simple_Animations/

Answer 2

There's lots of software available that will help you do this, much of it available for free. Indeed, you may already have the necessary software on your computer. Here is a good overview of the process itself and some of the software available.

Answer 3

Paint.NET is free and very good image creation software.

It has an active user base and active forums - see this post - "Make an Animated .GIF with Paint.NET"

Answer 4

You can do it using the convert command from the ImageMagick package.

Example:

convert -delay 20 -loop 0 frames*.gif  myanimation.gif

The -delay argument specifies the delay between frames (in units of 1/100s), white the -loop specifies if you want the animation to loop (may not work on all browsers).

Apart from creating animated gifs, convert can do a whole lot more so it's definitely worth having a look. I tend to use it mostly for converting between different image formats and mass resizing images.

Look here for more options: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/convert.php

Update

ImageMagick is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Unix/Linux. If you're on a Linux box, chances are you already have it installed :)

Answer 5

I recently needed to quickly toss a .gif image together. So i made each frame in paint then uploaded them all here which put them together into a gif image for me. Turned out pretty well actually.

Of course you can also download some client software to convert videos into .gifs, or i used to use Image Ready (if it's still around?)

Answer 6

To make gifs from a bunch of images, I use Gimp's "open as layers" features, and then I just have to save with a .gif extention.

You can find a more detailled explanation of the process here, which explains how to create a gif from a video file.

Answer 7

Whirlgif is a simple command line program to make animated GIFs.

We used it to make animated GIFs of Cassini images at Space Science Institute - so it's proven useful in real life.

Where it lives on the web these days, I'm not sure. Happy searching...

Answer 8

The easiest way is to use Photoshop, if you have it search on google for a tutorial, something like this