I do know how to do this in GIMP, though I’m going to warn you that if your gif is so big that you’d need to do this to lower the size, you’ll probably find that it’s way too much work to be worth it. Nonetheless, I’ll show you:
Tumblr, let me show you this thing. It’s an aspect ratio calculator.
http://andrew.hedges.name/experiments/aspect_ratio/
Most commonly, you will encounter videos whose aspect ratios are either 4:3 or 16:9 (widescreen).
Occasionally you will encounter videos on, say, YouTube, whose aspect ratios are wrong, which you’re going to want to fix if you do anything with them. For example, I was just looking at these screencaps:
Which look pretty good, but seem a little off. The dimension of these photos is 480x360. We can plug those into the aspect ratio calculator and it informs us that the aspect ratio of these pictures is, indeed, 4:3.
But I have a feeling they’re actually being squished. If they’re actually widescreen, they should probably have an aspect ratio of 16:9.
So I go back to the aspect ratio calculator. On the left side, I put in the aspect ratio I want (16/9). On the right side I put either the width (480) OR the height (360) into X or Y respectively, and aspect ratio calculator will tell me what the other one should be to make it 16:9.
So, I can open up my image in an image editing program. In GIMP, go to Scale Image, click the chain link (looks like 8 to the right of the dimensions) to turn off constrain proportions, and put in 270px for the height. In Photoshop, go to Image Size, uncheck constrain proportions, put in 270px for the height.
Much better.
Having screwed up proportions is a big, common mistake that beginners make when creating fan graphics and things. It pays to pay attention to them.
Just a post I’ve wanted to throw together for a while to introduce you to GIMP. It’s a freeeeeee program in the vein of Photoshop, which will let you draw and edit photos and all sorts of cool things. It’s pretty powerful for a free program, and for a while it’s been my program of choice for quick edits and things, and most of the things I post on Tumblr are made in GIMP. It can be a little confusing, so this post is just going to point out how to do some basic things that might be useful to the average Tumblr user and give you a place to start if you’re new to using it. I have a tutorial I made previously on how to make your own animated GIFs in GIMP.
You can get GIMP over at http://www.gimp.org.
Edit: Since time of posting, Tumblr has changed the maximum file size for animated gifs to 1MB. The ideas in this post are still relevant, but the example is a little outdated.
After Tumblr unceremoniously ate my answer to someone’s question yesterday (AND JUST ATE THIS POST TWICE WHEN I TRIED TO POST IT GRR), I’m going to explain how I helped take a gif that was too big for Tumblr and get it to an appropriate filesize, since I get asked about this fairly frequently.
Animated GIFs must be under 500KB under 1MB or 1024KB currently to work on Tumblr (via uploading). If they’re too big, when you upload them, they won’t move.
In Windows, you can right click on the file and choose ‘properties’ to see the file size. If it is over 500KB 1MB or 1024KB, it’s not going to work (if it’s measuring in MB at all, that probably means it’s over 1000KB). I’m going to take this gif:
Which is 0.98MB (which is about 1003KB), and I’m going to do a few tricks to turn it into this:
(If you’re viewing this post on your dash, make sure you click the thumbnails to see the full size of these images.)
Which is similar, but only 484KB, which is why it works on Tumblr.
When you have a gif that’s too big to work on Tumblr, there are four main ways you can make the file size lower:
For this animation, I’m going to use a combination of #1 and #3.
The animation is twice as large as it should be, so I know I’m going to have to make a dramatic change. One way you can get rid of a lot of frames (and therefore get the file size much lower) without making the animation itself shorte, is by deleting every other frame (the downside is the more you do this, the less smooth the animation looks). So for example, here I deleted all of the even-numbered layers.
See how at the end of each layer name it says (100ms)? That’s the amount of time you see each individual frame on your screen — 100 milliseconds. When you’re making the gif in GIMP, you probably don’t see that written there, as GIMP adds that in after you save. It figures out how many milliseconds to put there based on how you answer this question when you’re saving:
If I leave this animated at 100ms, it runs really fast, see?
I think I want to make it go slower, so I’m going to change the layers to say 200ms instead of 100ms, so that each individual frame will be shown longer.
After doing all of this, I save it again and it’s still just over 500KB. So I’m going to resize it (using Image > Scale Image…), from 477x218 to 450x206, to make it just a bit smaller. I save it one more time, and now it’s 484KB. Perfect for Tumblr!
A final note, about my original tutorial. In it, I give directions to go to Filter > Animation > Optimize (for GIF) before saving. I’m going to retract that advice, and next time I revise the tutorial I’ll remove that part. In my experience in helping people with problems like this, using Optimize with GIFs like these can cause more problems than its worth, and it does things that make it harder to edit GIFs after you save them, which is why my edited version of this person’s GIF has those weird block-y bits in between the girls’ faces (that shouldn’t happen to you when you’re making GIFs yourself).
In conclusion: Check the file size of your animated GIFs before you try and use them on Tumblr. If they are over 500KB 1MB or 1024KB, you may need to delete some of the layers or resize them to make them work.
As a side note, if you tried to get the original gif to be under 500KB without deleting any frames, you would have to resize it to this size:
Which may be preferable (and is much less work) if you don’t mind your GIF being smaller.
So, I know that’s a lot to think about, but I hope it helps give you a place to start if you have trouble getting your GIFs to work on Tumblr. Getting GIFs to be small enough is something a lot of us on Tumblr have to struggle with, so if you find it tricky, you’re not alone.
If you have any questions about making animated GIFs in GIMP, you can leave them in my ask box and I try to help where I can. You can also find some other posts I’ve made and questions I’ve answered about animated GIFs in my animated GIFs tag (you might just have to look amongst my GIF posts to find them, though…)
Hey! Your tutorial for making a GIF in GIMP was the best I've found so far, thank you so much! I wonder, can you tell me how to add text? I can't find a tutorial anywhere! Thanks! :)
I’m glad the tutorial helped you!
There are add-ons out there for more advanced control over GIFs in GIMP, I believe, but I’ve never really worked with any so I don’t know if there is an easier way to deal with text. But this is how I do it.
The idea is that each layer represents a frame of the animation, so you want to combine the text with each frame it appears on. So if I want the same text on every frame, I just duplicate the text and put it between each layer:
Then I combine the text layers with the picture layers by going Layer > Merge Down on the text layer (I added a shortcut for this in preferences so I can just hit the shortcut, then the down arrow to go to the next layer, etc. and have them all merged in a few seconds.) Then proceed as usual. Excuse my shitty thrown together example.
Then you can have different text for different parts of the animation or fade in/out just by playing with the text layers that correspond to particular animation frames before merging them (ex. here I didn’t add a text layer to some frames, and then across three frames had them go 25%, then 50%, then 75% opacity to fade in, and did the opposite at the end of the animation to fade out).
I hope that helps.
Now updated for GIMP 2.8 (if using an earlier version such as 2.6, you’ll want to use Save As… in place of Export…)!
Today, we are going to make an animated .gif using all free, open source programs with no watermarks. (This version of this tutorial is not going to cover ripping videos off YouTube, you’ll have to look into that yourself if you’re interested in that, since websites and add-ons for this are frequently changing)
What you need:
Download and install these as necessary.
For this example, I’m making a .gif from the 1925 silent film of The Phantom of the Opera, as it’s in the public domain and I happen to have it downloaded (doesn’t everyone?!).
Part one: Getting the screencaps
Note: The important part of this step is to amass the frames you’ll need for the animation. If Avidemux doesn’t work with your video or you otherwise can’t use it, you may need to open your video in an appropriate program and take screencaps yourself (roughly one every couple frames for the section of the video you’ll want to animate).
We’re going to need a set of screencaps from our video to form the frames of our animation, and Avidemux is very good for this.
Open your video in Avidemux. You might get messages from Avidemux about different options for dealing with your video depending on its format. This tutorial isn’t going to cover the details of Avidemux — as a general rule, just pick one, and if that doesn’t work, open the video again and pick the opposite.
Find the place you want your animation to start (try using the arrow keys to nudge to the perfect spot). Click the 
button. Find where you want the animation to end, and click the ![][B](http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l9xhl2cL271qd0aba.gif)
button.
Now File > Save > Save Selection as JPEG Images… Avidemux will save for you all of the frames in your selection as individual .jpgs, which could lead to a lot of images, so give your set of images a name and save them in an appropriate place.
Check to make sure Avidemux saved the images correctly.
Part two: Create the Animation
Open GIMP and go to File > Open as Layers…
If you used Avidemux to generate images for you, you probably have a lot of them and will have trouble keeping the filesize low enough if you use all of them. Try selecting all the even- or odd-numbered images (in Windows, you can select multiple, non-consecutive files by holding ctrl while you click them). Hit ‘Open’. GIMP will use each layer as a frame of your animation.
Now you’re going to want to crop and resize as necessary. In GIMP you crop using this tool: 
Click and drag to choose the area you want to keep and hit enter to crop it. To resize, go Image > Scale Image… You probably don’t want most gifs to be over maybe 250px at most in height or width unless they’re really short.
(If you’re making a Photoset, you might like to know that in rows with one image, that image should be 500px wide. In rows with two images, each should be 245px wide. In rows with three images, each should be 160px wide.)
Part three: Save the animation
Choose File > Export…
Give your animation a name and be sure to end it in ‘.gif’.
GIMP will give you these export options, and be sure to check ‘as animation.’
In this dialog we can control the speed of the animation. 100ms delay will probably be sufficient, but feel free to adjust as necessary.
For a gif to work on Tumblr, it needs to be under 1MB! If your gif is frozen on Tumblr, you may need to cut down the file size by resizing the image further or removing frames.
Using this process, we can produce a simple gif like this:
Yay!
Further Reading From Me
Conclusion
Hopefully now you understand how to make simple gifs on your own. If you run into problems with this tutorial, you can leave me a message in my ask box and I’ll try my best to help you out.
Go forth with the power of gifs!
The one I wrote continues to get likes and reblogs here and there and I’ve felt a little guilty that I haven’t gotten around to rewriting it. Do you have any suggestions on what you would like to see from the new tutorial?
Yes, I need to finish the compilation I promised first (I’m still looking for a full recording of Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind from Emma Hunton’s 2009 concert at Joe’s Pub SOMEONE HELP ME FIND THIS), and I’m not allowed to work on any extraneous projects until I get caught up on NaNoWriMo. However, sometime soon I’d like to do another tutorial on something.
So far I’ve posted tutorials on how to make a CD slip out of a piece of paper and also how to make your own animated gifs using all free programs.
Is there anything else (of things I probably know how to do) I should make a tutorial on? I was hoping to post a tutorial on how to make these little hand sewn dolls (I make bigger ones too) before Christmas, is that interesting?
EDIT: Please use this updated tutorial instead
Animated GIFs are fun. They’re all over Tumblr. Yet they’re a mystery to a lot of people — I’ve seen many a messy gif made with sites like gifsoup and people admitting they just don’t know where to begin in making their own. Allow me to teach you*, Tumblrites, how to make a simple animated gif from a YouTube video using all entirely free programs. Awesome. (I just figured out gifs in GIMP last night so experienced GIMP users should forgive any GIMP stupidity contained in this tutorial :P)
*assuming you aren’t on a Mac because I’m not sure GIMP is available for you. Everyone else should be okay. I’ll be demoing from Windows 7 (don’t hurt me.)
Today, I will be making this simple gif:
THINGS YOU WILL NEED (THEY ARE ALL FREE)
Download/Install those as necessary and then ONWARD!
Find a YouTube video you’d like to make a gif from (the section you wish to animate should be no more than a few seconds long for best results). Using 1-Click YouTube Video Download, download it to your computer — choose “MP4” (or “HD”) formats. I’m going to download this promotional video for the Japanese production of Spring Awakening.
Now open Avidemux and open your video (as a side note, if Avidemux won’t open the file, try dragging the file onto it and see if that works). If you get an “H.264 detected” message just click “No.”
Find the place you want your animation to start (try using the arrow keys to nudge to the perfect spot). Click the button. Find where you want the animation to end, and click the button. Now File > Save > Save Selection as JPEG Images… and give your set of images a name (you might want to create a new folder to save them in just to stay organized).
Check and make sure Avidemux successfully saved a bunch of JPGs where you told it to (there should probably be around 50-100 images depending on how long your animation is):
Awesome. Now let’s open GIMP — we’re going to have it take all of those frames and spit them back out as an animation!
Once GIMP is open, drag the first image in the sequence (the one ending in 0000) into GIMP. Now you’re going to want to drag about every other image on top of that one (so they all will end up layers within the same document). The reason we don’t drag in every one is it’s not really necessary — the animation will still look smooth without every frame, and we have to be careful about how large our file size ends up.
Make sure you can see the Layers dialogue (Windows > Dockable Dialogs > Layers) — it should be full of all of your images.
Now you’re going to want to crop and resize as necessary. In GIMP you crop using this tool: Click and drag to choose the area you want to keep and hit enter to crop it. To resize, go Image > Scale Image… You probably don’t want most gifs to be over maybe 250px at most in height or width.
Now we need to tell GIMP how long it should play each of these frames. To do this, we double-click on the name of a layer and add the number of milliseconds it should last for in parentheses after the name, like so, and hit enter:
100ms should be pretty good for something like this. Do this for every layer.
Let’s check out how it’s looking, shall we? Go Filters > Animation > Playback and click the play button. If everything’s going right, it should look good! Let me show you how to make it fade to black if you so desire, and then we’re almost finished:
Fading to black
I’m going to keep this pretty simple. First I will go to the last frame of the animation (that’s the layer at the very top of the layer list) and duplicate it (Layer > Duplicate Layer, or there’s a little icon right at the bottom of the Layers window that does it). Then I will make a new layer (Layer > New Layer etc), make sure my foreground color is black, and go Edit > Fill with FG Color.
Over in the Layers window there’s a slider to change the opacity of a layer. I’m going to want this black layer to be at about 50% opacity.
Then go Layer > Merge Down. We’ve now successfully created a layer that is partly faded to black.
Now make another new layer again and go Edit > Fill With FG Color to fill it with black again. You’re probably going to want the black layer to stick around a little longer, so I’ll set mine for 1000ms instead of 100ms (and I’m going to go back and set my half-black layer from the previous step to about 70ms just to make that transition a little smoother).
All Done?!
Once everything looks peachy, go Filters > Animation > Optimize (for GIF). When the new window comes up, go File > Save As…, give it a name, go to Select File Type at the bottom of the window and choose GIF Image. It’ll ask you if you want to Merge Visible Layers or Save As Animation — we want to save an animation of course! Hit Export. You’ll probably want to keep all the options in the next window as the defaults, so just click Save.
A ha! An animated gif!
A little roundabout perhaps (especially if you’re used to Photoshop as I am…)? Perhaps. But did you just make a gif all by yourself for free and without any weird tags from websites or anything slapped on it? Yes you did. And I’m sure it’s beautiful.
GO FORTH WITH THE POWER OF GIFs.
I hope this was of some use and not too confusing. If you have any questions about this tutorial (or spot any mistakes) you can drop it in my ask box and I’ll see what I can do for you.
Now I need to go quickly eat lunch because I spent almost all of my break between classes writing this. The things I do for you, Tumblr.
