Can someone tell me how to make an animated gif?

What are you looking for? I'll take a stab at it.

You can do it in any imaging program that supports layers. A free one is GIMP (http://gimp.org/) You just put whatever you want on separate layers and it will cycle through the layers at a speed you can specify. There are also programs that will do it for you, try googling "Make an animated gif"

what hamil said is what I did for this thing-



Its just a bit rough to learn how it works. Its a lot better with the GAP, but they don't have a windows installer for that yet. Basic animations will work though, just its not easy to modify the frames.

Bartster

I like your get up and go!
Mainly.. I just want to be able to take ...say an image of a thing and make it move...like a galloping dog or something.
I don't really have any actual thing I just wanna know how to do it.

lhamil64
I will try the GIMP (http://gimp.org/)..I did not notice that one Googling.

Vaerli

I like that it is cool and also along the lines of what I am trying to do.
I did try Googling animated gif and I found lots of sites where I could make one on their site but I want to do it myself.

I don't know what programs you use, but you can use Photoshop and ImageReady to make animations.

I thought maybe you meant creating a animated userbar. I noticed your signature has the two colored bars
and you were having trouble with that. I just made one today (userbar), and it took going to several sites to
find one that would work.

As far as do it yourself, that's outta my league. It would be fun to learn how, though.

What exactly are you trying to make? Are you just going to draw it yourself? Are you rendering something? The GIMP works for what I do only because i have every single frame. Other things aren't really that great for the GIMP, unless you can get the GAP.

An animated GIF, is a file made up of layers of images, stacked one on top of the other.
In each layer, the image is a little bit different than the previous image.
So, when each image is "flipped through" at a given speed, the image appears to move, like the old flip-books we used to make as kids.
This is a rather simplistic explanation, but that's how it basically works.
Here's a YouTube vid that shows what I'm talking about:
[Flipbook]Action Study
This explains how it works:
The FLIP BOOK

So, the first thing you need is a group of images, each slightly different than the other.
Then you'll need a program to "stitch" them together.
An easy program to use, for that, is UnFREEz.