You know, pictures have a place because they show you an exact moment, you basically can freeze the time. And you know, videos have a place because they entertain you for a longer time than a picture. But there is also something in between and I am talking about GIF animations. They capture a smaller time frame that you can extract from a video. That’s a way to show a very certain moment, not just with one frame as in the case of a photo, but also not with that many frames contained in video. To me it’s as I said, somewhere in between. I think we all know these moments where we found a very funny microexpression (for example funny smiling) in a video, or where other interesting things happen in a short period of time that make us wonder how that would look like if that moment would be in an infinite loop. I don’t want to explain you what a GIF animation is because I am pretty sure we all know what it is, but I am just explaining what I find interesting about it.
As much as I like to take a look at GIF images, it’s the more surprising that I didn’t create my own GIF files very often. Today I looked for tools that make the process very easy and there are quite some options including mobile apps, websites that help you creating your animations and tools that you can run with your PC operating system. I am generally more a fan of applications that I can run directly on my computer in Windows. Mainly because I am an old-fashioned PC evangelist, and also because I value customisability a bit more than simplicity, which means PC applications give me more options. But I don’t need a very complex application for this use case and thought a small and handy freeware tool would do the job. I found ScreenToGif, a small tool that allows you to capture GIF’s directly on your screen, for example, you basically just need to draw a frame around your own YouTube video and press the record button in the tool. After that you can edit the captured frames and save the GIF to your hard drive. It does the job well. So, from now on I can create GIF files of funny moments that I found in my own videos.
Diary of Dennis 
[ Smiles ] I can see that Shyna is having lots of fun!
That is one cool-looking GIF!
I took that scene out of a very old video I had on YouTube but you’re still right 🙂 Up to this day she is still up for shenanigans and afterwards she plays hide and seek with me as in the GIF 🙂
I enjoy making GIFs myself! They are fun, easy to do (on my smart phone), and they add a time dimension to my posts that otherwise isn’t there.
I find GIFs so funny… and people are very creative with them so that they make me often smile 🙂 They are definitely entertaining 🙂
I agree! I enjoy seeing other peoples’ GIFs because many are incredibly well done.
I have never experimented with GIFs but I might just try it. I also agree and prefer working with a PC.
Yes. I use some apps on my tablet and phone, for example I do currently use a language learning app on my tablet because I try to refresh my French, stuff like this is more handy on the tablet… but when it’s about creativity, apps for mobile devices just don’t do it in my opinion except if you just want to quickly edit snapshots with these post-processing apps, but it’s just not as serious as PC software and I prefer Lightroom or Photoshop. Generally, working on the PC is so much more comfy. I think it depends what you do, more complex tasks are better done when you work on the PC 🙂
I think the freeware tool I linked to is small and handy, but it does the job of recording gifs from your videos. When you did record a moment, you just need to delete some recorded frames until you are happy with the lenght and frame rate of the gif. Give it a try 🙂
I will try it. It looks like it might be fun.
Such a clever way to make pictures come to life. It can easily add a lot of humor too 🙂
Yes, that’s what I like too. It makes scenes funny 🙂 Does especially work great with cats 😀