Image to GIF

Assembling still images into an animated GIF suits a specific set of jobs: before-and-after comparisons, step-by-step instructions where each frame is a screenshot, simple slideshows that need to play inside an email, product views rotating through angles, and time-lapse sequences built from photos taken at intervals.

What it is not good for is anything that wants smooth motion. An animation assembled from stills is a sequence of distinct frames rather than continuous movement, and adding enough frames to make it look fluid produces a file too large to be practical. If the goal is smooth motion, record video and convert that instead.

Two settings determine whether the result is readable. Frame duration should match what the viewer has to do on each frame: around 100 to 200 milliseconds for a slideshow the eye just follows, and 800 to 1500 milliseconds for frames carrying text or a screenshot someone actually has to read. The most common mistake is a step-by-step GIF that advances faster than anyone can read it, and because GIFs loop endlessly, the viewer is left waiting for the frame to come round again.

Consistent dimensions matter more than anything else. A GIF has one canvas size, so images of different sizes get fitted or padded, and the result jumps around as it plays. Crop or resize every source image to identical dimensions first — use Image Resize or Image Crop — and the animation sits still while the content changes, which is the effect you want for a before-and-after.

Frame count and dimensions decide size, and both are easy to overshoot. Every frame is stored close to whole, so 30 frames is roughly ten times the size of 3. Use the fewest frames that tell the story: a before-and-after needs two, a three-step process needs three or four, and a slideshow rarely improves past about ten.

Dimensions matter just as much. A GIF built from full-resolution photographs will be enormous; resize the sources to the width the GIF will actually be displayed at, commonly 480 to 800 pixels, before assembling. Content type is the last factor: screenshots, diagrams, and flat graphics compress very well within GIF's 256-colour palette, while photographs do not, so a photo slideshow will always be larger and show more banding than the equivalent built from interface captures.