What is the above image called? Yeah you guessed it right it’s a GIF image. Now what are GIF images? GIF or Graphic Interchange Format are Bitmap images with some animation put into it. These images are seen quite frequently on the internet these days. Hence I wish to show you the methodology of creating such images yourself. This can be done using a software known as GIF animator. The working principle of a GIF animator is that it integrates different frames of the same image to form a single animated GIF image. The GIF animators are as follows:-

1. Advanced GIF animator: – Considered as one of the best in class by professionals it can be used to create dazzling banners, buttons       and avatars. You don’t need to go on the name though as it is very user-friendly and can be used by both amateurs and professionals. Its versatility is also shown by the fact that it can be run on all the operating systems ever created by Windows till now. It was released in March 2009 and supports all file types like JPEG, BMP, ICO, AVI, TIFF and Windows Meta Files. Some of its features include cropping, resizing, duplicating, merging, flipping and import/export of .avi and .ani files.

             

2. Microsoft GIF animator: -A simple GIF animator that can be used to create eye-catching animated GIF images. As it is completely free software so it offers you all the basic features like cut, paste, copy, save, delete, select all frames, preview etc.

It comes with 3 Tabs (see pic) namely Options, Animation and Image.

•  The Options Tab is useful to import colour palette and dither method.
•  The Animation Tab can be used to adjust height, width, image count, looping and repetition of the animation.
•  The Image Tab helps us to change the image height, width, alignment, duration and transparency and transparent colour.

To make the best use of such a historic software based on GIF89a file format ever created see http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~bats/PDF/Students/WWW/Gifanimator.pdf.

To download it visit http://download.cnet.com/Microsoft-GIF-Animator/3000-18512_4-12053.html .

3. GIFup: -Now here comes an online GIF creator for all those busy guys who feel downloading software is a waste of time. This interactive GIF animation creator on http://gifup.com/ is very user friendly and quick to use. You can upload images from the computer (max size=1024kb), take image from your webcam or get images from Flickr or other websites. The site also offers free avatars and GIF images from the wide gallery collection. You can even register (which will take less than a minute) to make organized GIF albums for future viewing and sharing purposes.

 5.  PhotoScape: – This is not solely a GIF animator but can be used as one. You just need to pick up your photo and drop it on the screen ( see pic) . The different images will then be integrated into a single GIF image separated by specified time intervals.

Many people consider it to be a worthy substitute for Adobe  Photoshop due to its easy to use features. Its key features are as shown in the pic below: -

The only drawback that it suffers from is that it can be used only on Windows operating systems. The best thing about this Korean developed software is that it is completely free of cost and can be downloaded from here.