GIF Animations

GIF animations are a simple, "low-budget" means of giving your web pages motion.

Some image editors include a module for creating GIF animations. For example, later versions of Paint Shop Pro come with "Animation Shop", a full-featured tool for creating animated gifs.

Other products exist - both commercial and shareware. GIF animation files appear in a folder to be simply a single gif file. In fact some software such as many image editors render them as such. However, animated gifs are actually a sequence of gif files created so that when rendered rapidly in succession give the appearance of motion almost identical to viewing the images on movie film.

IrFanView is a good shareware program that does animated gif extraction of frames, editing, etc.

UnFREEz is a very simple animated gif creator. You may wish to use it in conjunction with IrFanView.

Perhaps the best of the shareware (try-before-you-buy) genre is Animated GIF Banner Maker. I recommend using this product for our class. More sophisticated commercial programs are also available.

Below you see two animated gifs. You may wish to load these into your animated gif editor and experiment with changing parameters such as frame duration and transparency.