Creating easy Gif animations using some free tools

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Gif is the most popular image format for animated pictures and logos. Gif animation is widely used in web animations, user avatars, smileys etc.

This guide will help you to create custom gif animations from slides of still pictures or video using GIMP and VirtualDub.

Creating Gifs using still pictures

Step 1

Open GIMP->then open the stills in GIMP using Open as Layers… option from File [Ctrl+Alt+O] and then browse and select the image files to be opened, click open.

Step 2

Press Ctrl+L to open the Layers window for viewing and applying delay to the slides/layers of images. This delay is the duration of time for which the layer will be displayed and after that next layer will be displayed.

Just right click each layer and then click Edit Layer Attributes… to enter a delay value.

e.g. if you wish to have a delay time of 500ms then enter it in this format (500ms) as Layer name.

Step 3

To preview the animation click Filters from GIMP menu bar, then select Animation->click Playback.

Now to save the animation click File->Save as->then give a file name of your choice and .gif as the extension name->click Save->select Save as Animation->then click Export->Save.

Creating Gif from Video

Step 1

Open VirtualDub->click File->Open a video file->then browse and select a video file, then click open to open it.

Step 2

To save the whole video as Gif animation click File->Export->Animated GIF.

* Saving a whole video as gif is not a good idea if the video is of long duration (greater than 2 min), because it require more time and storage space to encode and save the video as gif. So its better to choose a selection of video for exporting into gif animation.