If you want to make a cool animated profile picture, you should think about making a GIF. They’re really easy and quick, and as long as you have the materials (a series of images or a video), it couldn’t be easier.
To take the pain out of the process, we’ve rounded up 3 of the best desktop apps for creating GIF animations. Download the one you like the best, get animating and a funny GIF avatar will be yours!
Easy GIF Animator is one that lives up to its name – it’s a feature-rich, easy-to-use GIF animator that’s especially useful if you want to make GIFs from scratch – i.e. without a set of images. That’s particularly useful if you want to make a text-based GIF, say with a song lyric, funny quote or instructions. Easy GIF Animator isn’t a free program, but the trial version has 20 free uses, so you’re sure to be able to get what you need.
MS GIF Animator is an old-fashioned program, but it’s no-install and free, so if you want to get animating quickly, it’s the perfect fix. This app supports .AVI video. Making a GIF from a video file is the ultimate easy GIF and takes an absolute a minimum of effort – just grab an .AVI file, pick the frames you want and save as a GIF. MS GIF Animator will let you make various tweaks and improvements, but even with very little involvement, you’ll still get a great GIF!
Beneton Movie GIF is the last in our list. Completely free and very user-friendly, it has loads of sample GIFs and help, so even if you are attempting something a little more complex, you won’t have any problems. It doesn’t support video however, and be warned that it tries to install other software items, so keep an eye on the installation process!
