What are my options for free .GIF animation software?

Question

In the past, I have dabbled in sprite-based animations. For instance:

However, that time was about 8 years and several computers ago, and I no longer have the animation software I used to fabricate the above image.

I decided that I was interested in trying my hand at this again, and so I first tried to find the program I had used last time, a program with a free version called Animagic. However, I can find no current website offering that software, and as the alternative appears to be a rapid share link (claiming to contain the program) I think it might just be better to find a more recent, still supported program instead.

As shown above, I'm not trying to do anything overly complex; I already have the frames, I'm just looking for a program (very preferably free) that will allow me to combine them and adjust the timing of the resultant animation.

I have absolutely no knowledge of visual design, so I was hoping someone here would have a better idea as to what software I'm looking for in the first place.

Answer 1

Probably GIMP. You can edit it as well while you're at it. Basically you add them in as layers, then when you save as GIF, it will give you an option to animate or merge.

If you just want to stitch them together, ImageMagick would probably do the trick too, but I wouldn't know how.

Answer 2

I still make GIF's the hard way, frame by frame in Imageready.

Answer 3

What I do is use imagemagick's convert command from the command line like so :

$ convert frame1.png frame2.png frame3.png ... result.gif

Of course, if all files follow a certain pattern I just use the asterisk

$ convert frame*.png result.gif

Open that gif file in gimp, save-as, and this will give the knobs to adjust the framerate (I use 25 when I convert a video to gif using ffmpeg -i inputfile.mp4 outputfile.gif).