Create Animated Images (MS GIF Animator)

Posted by Faheem Mustafa

Want to create a simple animated GIF to use as forum Avatars? Here's a free tool from Microsoft which was released a long time ago for Windows 95 but is still useful till this date.

Tested working on Windows 7 machine :)

1) First prepare individual images that you would like to use to create your final animation. You'll have to crop/resize them to the same dimension and save as GIF format first. (Using software such as Paint.NET to do so)

In this example I'll use the 5 pictures as shown above

2) Launch Microsoft GIF Animator and click 'open' (Button A below), start with the last file in the series (in this case 5.gif). Proceed to use 'insert' (Button B) a couple of times to import the remaining images. You may use the toolbar buttons to reorder your images if you want.

3) After that click 'select all images', enter the pause duration between each frame and finally click 'Play' to preview your animation. When you're satisfied, click 'Save As' to save your final GIF animation. See the screenshot below that highlights sequence of the buttons to be pressed.