Creating an Animated GIF

After the last photo challenge, I received a few blogger questions about how I showed “before” and “after” photos by flipping back and forth in the same photo frame. What is this technique and how to do you do it? Here are the key words you need to know: animated GIF. It’s a single graphic file that contains a series of images which are displayed sequentially to give the illusion of movement or change over time.

Many photo editing programs can help you create an animated gif file. I recommend that you use your favorite web browser search engine to find tutorials for the programs that you use. There are also many free animated gif generators available on the web, but I haven’t personally tried them. Thus, I can’t endorse them.

If you are looking for a good photo editing program that you can download for free, I recommend Photoscape (Microsoft Windows compatible). Besides doing basic editing chores, Photoscape makes many specialty tasks easy, like creating animated gifs and mosaics. That’s what I used to upload two pictures and create the animated picture of Marty shown above. Cool, huh?

To save your gif file for your blog post, upload it to Picasa via your Blogger editor. If you upload your pictures to another photo web host site and then use web links, you’ll have to test out whether the site successfully uploads gif files. I use Flickr and Photobucket links for the finer photographic images in my blog posts. I tested uploads to both sites. Gif files do not work on Flickr, but they do on Photobucket. Go figure!

So I hope that you will try creating a gif file soon! Then you’ll be “winking” right back at Marty!