Animated GIFs get more and more attention in the web – at the latest 2003/2004, when the GIF patents extinguished. A GIF image can contain lots of frames (single images) and displays itself the next image/frame after a few seconds. That is a good way to show short clips, advertising banners or a small gallery.
In this article we introduce 11 online tools you can use for gif animations.
What is a GIF file?
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It allows at most 256 colors – significantly less than other image formats such as PNG or JPEG. But therefore and because it provides a good compression GIF files are really small.
The other special thing of GIF is the animation feature. A GIF file can contain, as written above, lots of frames. So there a several images in one image file. For this animation feature there are lot of online tools. 11 of them are presented here.
11 must-have online tools for GIF animations
- Video to GIF converter
On ezgif.com you can easily upload video files (MP4, WEBM, AVI, FLV, MOV and others) and convert them into a gif file. - Simply GIF generator
For example for advertising banners a gif basing on a few image files (PNG, GIF, JPG) can be helpful. You can use this GIF generator to create it, or to extract frames from an animated GIF file by uploading it. - Youtube to GIF
Giphy.com supports not only uploaded files, but also Youtube, Vine and other video URLs. The user-friendly interface makes it easy to create GIFs from Youtube videos and others. - GIF optimizer
Smaller files are always welcome. Use gifgifs.com to reduce GIF files by reduce colors, by drop frames or by a lossy gif optimization. - gifgifs.com archive
On the same website gifgifs.com you can find lots of GIFs in categories such as animals, sports and nature. - GIFs on giphy
Giphy.com is a popular website for lots of GIF images you can download and use. - “Best” gif animations
According to its name you find on bestanimations.com really good GIFs. Try it out! - GIF splitter
You want to extract the different files of a GIF animation? GIFMaker.me is doing a good job. - Another splitter: GIF Explode
Another tool for splitting a GIF file into its frames is gif-explode.com. - Online Image Editor, also for GIFs
The Online-Image-Editor.com does not only supports BMP, JPG and PNG, but also animated GIF files. For example you can crop the image and add photo borders. - Another free GIF maker
The 11th tool in this article is freegifmaker.me supporting Youtube videos and interesting animated gif effects.
We hope you got a good overview of interesting and helpful online tools for your animated GIFs.