Department of Engineering

Producing animated gifs with GIMP

GIMP ("GNU Image Manipulation Program") is a free graphics program that's on our Teaching System. It has so many features that it's not always easy to find what you want. Here's how to produce an animated icon for a WWW page.

• Start GIMP. One way to do that on the Teaching system is to click on the button then click on the "More Applications" button and search.
• Load a picture in. You can do a screen capture using the Acquire item in the File menu, or you can load a file in using the Open item of the File menu. Use a small image (or shrink a big one). For this example I'll use
  
• From the Filters menu choose the Animators item. A list of features will appear. Some may be greyed out - it depends on the image you've loaded in. Select Rippling ... and click on the OK button. A new window will appear. This is the animated GIF. To see it in action, use the Filters menu - there's an Animation item there with a Playback option that will open a window like this
  . If you don't like what you see when you use the Play/Stop button you can go back and change the options, or try another Filters effect.
• To save the file, use the Save option in the File menu. You'll need to have .gif on the end of the file-name, and you'll need to choose Save as Animation when the Export panel appears.

You should now have an animated gif that you can embed in a web page. Here's one I made earlier

You can try out the other animation options in the Filters menu, or download new features from the Gimp Plugin Registry. The Blend effect produces a sequence by interpolating the images in the Gimp layers. Here's a small example
. This effect can be used to sample from a movie