How To Create A Gif

shameless self-promotion for my book, Un-Crap Your Life

Creating a gif is ridiculously easy. However, I have a habit of making simple things absurdly complicated. When I first realized I couldn’t go another day without trying to make my own gif, I went about it in the most complex way possible: I thought I had to have a program like Photoshop to make a gif. I don’t own a copy of Photoshop. I use a free open-source imaging program called GIMP instead. I love it, mostly because it’s free. I looked into GIMP’s gif-making capabilities and then decided I didn’t want to screw with it. So I did a search online, “how to make a gif”. Giphy.com popped up.

Where the fuck have I been for last 5 years? Giphy.com solves all my gif making problems!

Creating a gif using giphy.com is as easy as copying and pasting a YouTube link into a website. I haven’t yet figured out how to get the exact clip from YouTube and then paste that into Giphy, though.

However, there are other cool things you can do on Giphy like upload one of your own still images and then add moving text, like the gif above. I made that one on Giphy five minutes ago without having to set up an account or pay any money. I added the blue filter and the text effects there. You can also add stickers, subtitles and captions, just using your still images. Go to the GIF CAPTION header to make these types of gifs.

For all my other image editing, I use Enlight. I use Enlight every day and clearly I’m addicted to it. Here’s an image I created using Enlight, where I added many images with the TOOLS section and the MIXER selection. The photo collage below was created with 7 different images, all layered onto each other. All this image layering is done only on my iPhone, using my fingertips to erase parts of the image. It feels a lot like painting!

By the way this is not a paid or promoted post by Enlight or Giphy. These are the tools I use the most.

Thank you for your attention in this matter,Leah