Need a high-quality, but fast and easy, way to generate animated GIFs.

September 17, 2014 9:43 PM

Are there any free high-quality GIF generator sites or programs that allow you to make animated GIFs from videos that don't add watermarks to your GIFs?

I'll admit that I'm not a huge fan of animated GIFs. But every now and then I like to make ones from videos to amuse myself and others with.

I realize that there are lots of ways to make animated GIFs but I'm simply looking for sites or programs where all that's required to generate a GIF is to load a video, click once or twice and, a minute or less later, have an animated GIF sitting on your desktop ready for you to use. I don't feel that GIFs are worth dedicating tons of time and energy on so I'm not too interested in super complex, time-consuming ways of making them. And of course complex and time-consuming methods of generating GIFs would likely give me better quality results, but I don't care all that much.

I used to be a fan of the animated GIF generator site Imgflip and it was at one point the only animated GIF generator I ever needed as it allowed me to generate super high-quality GIFs with speed and ease. But now they add watermarks to GIFs and, as I just can't stand watermarks, that site's become useless to me.

posted by GlassHeart to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

You could try fiji, a biologist-oriented image processing program that has tons of features, including saving image series as gifs. However, I'm not sure what video formats it accepts.

Also, if you have any programming experience, whipping up a quick python script that does this would probably be really simple.
posted by serif at 10:47 PM on September 17, 2014

On the programming experience thought, a mix of ffmpeg and imagemagick could do what youre looking to do. http://blog.room208.org/post/48793543478(Scary, but legit page)
posted by edman at 11:23 PM on September 17, 2014

Turn Any Youtube Video Into a GIF by Just Adding GIF to the URL seems like it would be the ticket for you?
posted by flippant at 12:45 AM on September 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

Not sure if this is more trouble than you're looking for, but you can use VLC Media Player to extract frames from a video file & open some of those frames as layers in GIMP, & save or export (depending on OS) as GIF.
posted by univac at 1:00 AM on September 18, 2014

If you don't need to select portions of the videos (if they're just clips that you want to convert in their entirety to animated .gifs) ffmpeg can do this easily. No programming required. Here are Windows versions of ffmpeg:

http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

If you do need to pick out portions of the videos to convert, that's not much harder. Just a little. edman's link has details on that.
posted by jingzuo at 1:05 AM on September 18, 2014

GifCam is super simple.
posted by maggieb at 3:32 AM on September 18, 2014

Best answer: Instagiffer. I use it from time to time to make gifsets for tumblr.
posted by ArmyOfKittens at 4:10 AM on September 18, 2014 [2 favorites]

If you're looking for extremely dumb and low-tech you can use freeware Gyazo to take a Gif screen shot of anything on your browser.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:11 AM on September 18, 2014

http://gifff.fr/ makes GIFs from Youtube videos. No watermark and easy to use from what I remember.
posted by purple_bird at 9:05 AM on September 18, 2014

Response by poster: ArmyOfKittens: 'Instagiffer. I use it from time to time to make gifsets for tumblr.'

Now that is some killer animated GIF software and is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
posted by GlassHeart at 4:50 PM on September 18, 2014