This guide will help you create those moving images called animated gif's. These are not movies but pictures that have been combined and are displayed in a slide show manner to give the picture the look of a movie.

Step 1: Making the Pics

The first step in our process would be to get the pictures you want to use into the .gif format. This means you will either have to convert pictures you already have on hard drive or you will take pictures from a digital camera and transfer them onto your hard drive and then possibly convert them into gif's or you will be taking stills from a movie, otherwise know as taking screen shots or captures. Also you may want to resize the picture you will use, especially if you will being using the pictures on my space or blogs, avatars etc, because the finished file can be very large if you keep the files at lets say a 640 x 480 dimension which is the normal dimensions a digital camera will take pictures at.

To perform the conversion from any photo type into gif and the resizing if necessary we can use a great program called PhotoFiltre. http://www.photofiltre.com/ This program is free, and easy to use. Just Down load the English version and install. The programs best asset along with the conversion and resizing is batch processing. That means we can do entire sets of files or folders full of pictures in one step. Load PhotoFiltre go to Tools>Automate / Batch.

Step 2: Resize Images

1st. Click the image resize box and then set the size you want for the pictures. I recommend 160 x 140.

2nd. Click the Action tab then click ok to perform the conversion and or resizing.

Step 3: Side Step If Using Video

This is more of a side step to step one but its important if the Animated gif you want to make is from a video source. To start we need to create pictures of the video. I use a program called
Moviesnapshot http://www.cd2html.de/moviesnapshot.en.html
With this program you can open any avi or wmv movie (sorry no quicktime).

1. open the movie file you want to make screen captures from.

2. save the pictures at the different intervals you would like.

3. Begin at step one to start the conversion / resizing.

Step 4: Putting It All Together

OK So now we should have a folder of gif file pictures in the size that we want. How do we get them to be one file that moves. With unfreeze. Once again the file is free and simple to use.
http://www.whitsoftdev.com/unfreez/

1st. Drag and drop the files you want to use into this area.

2nd. Pick how long of a delay you want betwwen each picture. I normally start with 15, then 30 etc.

3rd. Click make animated gif, and check out how your picture came out.

Step 5: Last But Not Least

Several program exist that are freeware, shareware, etc that do either several steps of the creation of gf files or do it all for you
just google the term avi gif
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=avi+gif&btnG=Google+Search
or animated gif for more programs and explanations
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=make+animated+gifs&btnG=Search

Enjoy and Good Luck