Expert: Andre Hickman - 11/11/2009

Question
i want to make a animated gif or a slideshow image out of a few jpeg pictures i have but everytime i try to make 1 from gifninga or gif making site its really small, looks weird like the color faded, slow or it doesnt finish the animation like it only goes half way through. i tryed useing a free software photobie and i couldnt figure it out and making a video of it and then converting it into gif format but didnt work. do you know how to make a gif image that shows all my pictures and in HD?

Answer
Hey Krystine,

I can't help much if you don't have professional software at your disposal, like Photoshop, After Effects, or even Flash, but I did find another site online that looks very promising...

http://www.gifsoup.com

Try to do it there. Now as far as HD? That is an insanely large .gif image, and the technology behind a .gif simply isn't made to move frames that large that fast (HD is 1920x1080 for 1080p and 1280x720 for 720p).  You may want to scale the size of your frames down considerably, especially if you want it to play smoothly and up to speed. With frames that size, the online apps probably refuse to handle that file size, because it is not really optimal for online viewing.

If it doesn't have to be a .gif, then you may want to look into creating a Flash .flv movie...of course that would require having flash software, or some software that can convert video to flash video.

I hope this helps. Again HD is waaay too big for a .gif.  You can still use the same length and width ratio that HD uses, but try to scale the images down, to where the width is less than 500pixels (i.e. the image is less than 500x282)

Cheers,
Andre'