Animated gif, Memes and Cat Videos are all still effective ways of capturing the attention of people. This is because they are disruptive to the normal flow of the day which makes them stand out.
Instagiffer
The tool that we have been using to create our animated gifts is called instagiffer and can be downloaded from instagiffer.com. It is an app available for both Windows and Mac. When you run it on your desktop PC, you can import a video, a YouTube URL or capture the screen.
Set a start time and the length of your giff., You can also adjust the smoothness of the gift by selecting the number of frames per second. Take care with this because more FPS frames per second you use the larger the resulting file will be. Likewise increasing the quality will affect the final image and the foresight. If relevant, you can adjust the brightness of the image. Finally, the playback rate allows you to speed up or slow down the image animation.
There is also a range of effects and filters that can be added to the image these include enhancing, colour fade towards black-and-white, sepia tone, a colour eyes a blur, or straight black-and-white.
You are now ready to create your Giff.
You can upload your Giff and use in many ways, but certain applications will not take the animated effect of your Giff and therefore you must employ different methods.
WordPress
When you upload an image to your WordPress this, it will very kindly re-size the image for you. So any use of a featured image will be automatically resized to the required size and lose it’s animation. If you add an image into your media Media, you probably still have the option to chose full-size. This will be the original and therefore will animate. All other resized versions will not animate.
Facebook also suffers from the corruption of an animated gift when you upload. To use an animated gift within a Facebook post, you must upload elsewhere first, and then refer to the URL of the gift in your Facebook post. Therefore, you could take the URL we copied and pasted in the above WordPress example. Now you could paste this url from within a post on your Facebook page. Please bear in mind that although you would love this to go viral around the world, it is now referring to an image on your WordPress site (or wherever else you put it) and every person that downloads and sees that animated gift will be using the resources of your WordPress site (or wherever else you put the file)
Twitter loves animated gifts and allows us to select the image and upload it without any problems. The animation is there then for all to see. Before you think of it, no you cannot use the reference to use this image elsewhere.
You can easily upload an animated gif onto your Pinterest Board. Pinterest also allows you the ability to share pins onto your Facebook page. However, the image put on your Facebook page will not be animated even though the image on your board will remain animated.
