Choosy Designers Choose GIF

Although we may know them best from looping cat clips and viral memes of would-be stunt people face-planting on concrete, animated GIFs (short for Graphics Interchange Format) can be attention-grabbing and informative for demonstrating brief processes or simple actions. They can get your point across visually in a dynamic way that allows learners to follow along from start to finish.

Creating and manipulating animated GIFs can be a time-consuming task that could involve using expensive software. So I was pleased to discover EZGIF.com, a free resource that puts many GIF making tools right at your fingertips without needing to learn how to use an image editing program.

Some of the helpful GIF-related tasks EZGIF.com can perform include:

• Creating animations from scratch
• Resizing (upload your own image or use one already online)
• Cropping
• Optimizing (color reduction, remove frames)
• Adding effects (rotate, reverse, change speed, add text)
• Extracting specific animation frames
• Converting videos files to GIF (formats include MP4, AVI, WEBM, and FLV files up to 50MB)

After you make all the necessary changes to your GIF, you are presented with a link to download your newly edited image in a jiffy instantly.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.