You Can Trust Our Reviews
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
Buying Guide: How to Make Animated GIFs
Contents
- How to Make Animated GIFs
- Web Tools
- Desktop Tools
- Mobile Tools
Once upon a time, the animated GIF—a image file that loads in a browser and plays a small, constantly looping animation instead of showing a still image—was the bane of many websites' existences (think MySpace and GeoCities). The files were big, slow to load, and thrown on pages by the hundreds, with annoying music to create meme monstrosities such as the legendary Hampster Dance.
That was a different era; a time when the Internet was built on dial-up and slow-to-load Web pages. Plus, creating an animated GIF was difficult, if not outright impossible for the layman. Today, animated GIFs are used the world over to bolster many a meme, or simply to comically illustrate a point.
These days anyone can easily make all the animated, looping image files they want. It doesn't matter if the subject is their own art, their own photos or videos turned into a silent mini-cartoon, or a moving picture cribbed from the billions of hours of video that exist on the Web (especially on YouTube, a cornerstone of "borrowing" frames to animate). There are tools aplenty to turn your files from smartphones, cameras, and camcorders into animated GIFs to post on your blog or to share on the many sites that use them, such as I Can Has Cheezburger.
Sadly, most social networks like Facebook and Twitter don't allow the files to animate, fearing the same slow loads that were a pain a decade ago. You can take that up with them. But places like Tumblr use animated GIFs as the backbone of their publishing system for bloggers without much to say. If you need a GIF to spell out how you feel, you can find a lot of them at the Web's premier animated GIF search engine, Giphy.
Better yet, join the crowd creating animated masterpieces from your cat videos and crying faces. Here are the tools that will get you going, whether you want to create them on the Web, on your desktop, or on your smartphone/tablet.