My use of homebaked gifs has verged on obnoxious, but this animated image format can be very useful in blogs to clearly demonstrate how to do something or to add a little fun.
I won’t try and justify them, but I will show a few ways to create your own animated gifs.
ScreenToGif – Free gif creation and edit software
There are many ways to create gifs, but an easy way to create gifs based on things appearing on your screen is a piece of software called “ScreenToGif” and it can be found here.
Very simply, you can record a region of your screen and turn it into a gif. The process takes seconds, despite the interface being a little clunky (looking at you file name save feature). Record the process you are describing and it can make explanation so much simpler. See some examples of this below from my previous blogs. There is also some editing capacity with overlaying text, trimming
EZGif – Free online gif editor
If I ever need to edit gifs to, for example, overlay another image or text, I use Photoshop. But this software lies behind a paywall and I’d only recommend it for those that already have access to it. For other people, there are free alternatives. A quick google pulled up the following site which seems promising for most of the simple editing that you’d need to do for a gif.
AndThenIwasLike – Online webcam gifs
There’s this simple website, andtheniwaslike.co, to turn a short recording from your webcam to an animated gif. Of course, everyone wants to see your lovely face, especially in these CV-19 times, so add it into your blogs 💎. It couldn’t be much simpler than this one.
Examples
Below are a number of gifs that I have created for blogs, all of which can be created in the free tools mentioned above.
Do you have any recommendations? I’d love to hear them. I’m easiest to contact via twitter @chris_vizes.
