Creating an animated gif in Gimp

In my last post I described how I created an illustration of a taco. When I wrote that post I thought it might have been a good idea to illustrate the process using an animation. I had the steps of the process saved as images but I didn't really know how to create the animation so I skipped that and just put the images there one by one. Now I've actually had some time to look into how to create a gif animation using my go to image processing application Gimp. And guess what? It's really, really simple.

Start Gimp and include the content images

First, open up Gimp and select File > Open as layers..., this opens up a file selection dialog.

Now, if you've gathered all your images in one folder, select the all at once and open or else select one, open that and do it again until you've opened all images you need. If you now look in the Layers-"dialog". All your images should be there as independent layers, the layers named after your image files. Something like below.

Order the layers

As you can see in the image above, the images might not be very well sorted. For the animation the layers need to be sorted in a "first-image-at-the-bottom-and-last-image-at-the-top" type order. This is when I'm happy I named the process images the way I did. Sorting becomes pretty straight forward. Drag layer "HipsterTaco_2.png" and drop it just above "HipsterTaco_1.png" and so on.

Modify the different layers

If you need to make modifications to your layers, now is the time. All I had to do was to slightly resize and move the top layer "HipsterTaco_10.png" to align it properly to the other layers.

Export the whole enchilada... *sorry*

All there's left to do now is to actually create the animation. This is really simple in Gimp. In the main menu, select File > Export As..., name the resulting file and select filetype "Gif Image (*.gif)" then hit Export. This displays the "Export Image as GIF" dialog. Here check the "As animation" box and set a default delay between frames. I haven't set anything before so I set this to half a second and also I check the "Use delay entered above for all frames" box. I also make sure that "Loop forever" is checked since that's what I want.

Now just hit Export and the gif animation will be created. My result is seen below.

Ta-daa!

That's all for now. I'll hit you back in a moment.

10-4. //Niklas