Back during the days of Geocities, no website would be complete without a healthy dose of 256-color animated GIF images thrown in wherever possible. Twenty years later, GIF images haven’t aged a bit. Now more mature (and sometimes not), they still rule the internet in one form or the other whether they be providing demonstration of complex machinery, or showcasing something beautiful or posting awful memes.
Today, social media websites and networking sites are teeming with thousands of interesting and funny GIF images. Here are 5 ways to make animated GIF images more enjoyable.
GIF Print
Gifprint brings animated GIF images to real life by enabling you to print out all the frames of the GIF file and convert it into a flipbook. Simply upload a GIF image and Gifprint will return you a PDF file containing all the frames of the animation. Print the file, cut out all the individual frames, and staple it into a booklet. Now you can show-off the animation to anyone, anytime and anywhere.
GIF Explode
GIF explode converts any GIF animation to all of its individual frames. This allows you to extract any number of frames from the animation for other purposes. Of course, by exploding a GIF you can print them into a flipbook all by yourself. Make sure to leave a margin on the left so that you can staple.
Similar tools: GIF exploder, GIF Maker-Exploder
Gfycat (for Firefox / for Chrome)
Gfycat is an extension for Chrome and Firefox that automatically converts all GIF images found on a webpage, that are served from the popular image hosting and sharing site Imgur, into HTML5 videos thereby saving bandwidth as well as download time. The compression ratio is phenomenal, often in the order of 10:1. In other words, it saves more than 90% of bandwidth, which is great because the add-on is also available for Firefox mobile.
GIF Ctrl
GIF Ctrl gives you the ability to playback GIF images at your own pace. You can pause, reverse or go forward and then back again, all by moving the mouse pointer back ad forth across the screen.
Just upload a GIF animation and then use the mouse to control an invisible seek bar across the length of the screen. Drag the mouse pointer across the screen to animate the image at whichever direction you want at whatever speed.
GIF Scrubber
GIF Scrubber is available as an extension for Chrome and similar in capabilities to GIF Ctrl. To “scrub” a GIF image you find on a webpage, right-click on the image and choose the GIF Scrubber option. The GIF file will load in a video-like player with a seek bar using which you can move back and forth at will. You can also playback the animation at various speeds and also in reverse. Additionally, GIF Scrubber has a GIF explode tool built in.
Please, could you do a round up of (free) software for creating GIF animations? Thank you, Richard.
KickMyGraphics is a pretty good GIF animations creator.