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Making Animated Gifs

This guide demonstrates a few ways to make animated GIFs from generated content or by extracting frames from existing content.

What is a GIF? At a basic level, a GIF is an animated image made up of a series of images or frames of a video. It's typically very small in size, which means the quality is far less than standard or high definition video and often appears a bit grainy if highly compressed.

They are useful for sharing bite-size bundles of visual content. For instance, say you are trying to share a visual concept or UI design as a series of short animations. The most compact and way to do this is to generate GIFs vs using a high-res movie file. Many times, the same meaning can be conveyed in short simple bits of content.

Tools for Capturing Images and Video

macOS Screenshot Utilities

  • CMD + Shift + 3 = Capture all screens
  • CMD + Shift + 4, Define capture area
  • CMD + Shift + 4 > SPACEBAR to select window
  • CMD + Shift + 5 = All capture options including video capture

Tools for Making Gifs

Software

Web Based

Other Tools

  • Instasave - Simple tool for saving images and videos from Instagram posts and stories.