How to Create an Animated GIF: Webcam2GIF

Chris Pirillo — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 10:09:02 +0000

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I was moving my lips, but I wasn’t saying anything. It’s not a movie, it’s an animated .GIF. It’s a single file with a series of frames spliced together – set to loop forever. I made this in less than a minute! This was done with nothing more than my webcam, and an Adobe Air app called WebCam to GIF.

WebCam to GIF is a tool that lets you to create animated GIF images using your webcam. You can use this to create an animated avatar for forums, social sites and more. If you don’t already have the Air platform installed, you’ll want to do it. There are a ton of great apps available for it. The best thing is that it is cross-platform, and works on even Linux!!

This isn’t the first animated GIF I’ve ever made. I’ve been doing them for years – starting way back when all hyperlinks on the Web were blue. Yeah, I know, I’m getting “old”. GIFs are a lot of fun to play with, and are just another way you can enhance your photos and make them fun.

When looking at the program, you have the live preview on the webcam showing on the left side. On the right side, you have the way to browse the images you’ve taken in the series. You can choose how many times it will loop, and decide the quality and size of your creation. When you start snapping captures, you can move around and change the frames (or even delete frames from the series).

It’s easy to do, and it’s fun. Remember that it’s not a video… it’s a GIF! Take your series of photos, mash them together, and loop them forever! Have a GIF of yourself doing almost anything! Download and play with it, make your own GIFs, and come share them with the rest of us.

Want to embed this video on your own site, blog, or forum? Use this code or download the video:

How to Create an Animated GIF: Webcam2GIF

Chris Pirillo » animated-pictures

How to Create an Animated GIF: Webcam2GIF