How To Make Animated Gifs

These are my parents. I love them.

We had so much fun during the shoot that I found it hard to pick just one good shot from the series of consecutive shots. So I decided to put these into animated GIF file. Here is how you can do this by yourself using free software:

1. Download and install GIMP. It's free and it's badass.
2. Get at least three photos that tell a story. Think stop motion.
3. Upload them all as new layers into Gimp. "File" => "Open as layers"
4. View the animation. "Filters" => "Animation" => "Playback" => click the play button
5. Optimize the animation: "Filters" => "Animation" => "Optimize for GIF"
6. Shrink the size by indexing the colors (this will worsen the color quality of the GIF): "Image" => "Mode" => "Indexed"
7. Save the animation: "File" => "Save as" => pick GIF and make sure file ends in .gif => click save => dialog window pops up => select "save as animation" => click "export" => another dialog window pops up => select the time elapsed between frames (I think I am using 240ms) => click save
8. A pretty large GIF file gets saved to the file you picked. You can now upload it to the web and all major browsers will play the animation. 

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Comments

[Eva]

Fabulous!
They Love You too!

[ashi]

cool! I think if you adjust your palette mapping options, you won't see all the black noise in the final animation.

[Deni]

Will it work if uploaded to picasa album?

[Petra Cross]

Haven't tried it yet. If Picasa Web Albums won't convert the gif to jpg, it should work.