I’ve used it extensively for all my images (including ‘animated images’) on my Chess website … For most webmasters, who want to create their own website graphics/images, the price for Photoshop seems waaaaaaaaaaaay overvalued when compared with GIMP.

There is a slight learning curve, to get accustomed to where all the features are, but then it’s exactly the same for Photoshop … The only difference, here, is you’re not spending $700-$1000 for the privilege.

GIMP Animated Images
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With animated images, you can get more content into a small space (good for adverts/promotions!) …

You’ll find examples of my own animated images on the following webpages:

http://www.chess-game-strategies.com/attacking-play.html

http://www.chess-game-strategies.com/chess-tactics-images.html

Remember, each frame is a slightly different snapshot of your original image, which is what gives the optical illusion of animation in your images. All the Animated GIF does is quickly rotates each frame, to give the impression of animation.

GIMP & ANIMATED IMAGE CREATION
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For creating Animated images, in order to control the speed that each frame is displayed, you need to manually adjust the frame speed (in ‘ms’, milliseconds).

To do that, ‘right-click’ in the respective layers and and click ‘Edit Layer Attributes’.

Then, you can name each layer, for example:

frame 1 (300ms)
frame 2 (1800ms)
frame 3 (300ms)
..
frame 52 (413ms)

and so on.

Then, when you’re ready to save the file, what I do is select the following menu options:

1. Image > Mode > Indexed

A dialog box will pop up at this point, I leave ‘Generate optimum palette’ selected from the ‘Colormap’ option, then click the ‘Convert’ button).

2. File > Save As

Aype your filename, when prompted, and add “.gif” (without the quotations) to the end of the filename … So, it could look like technicallyeasy-promo-1.gif

Once you do that, you’ll be asked to whether you want to flatten the image or save it as an Animation. You, naturally, choose the latter option … and your newly created animated image will be saved as an Animate GIF.

***IMPORTANT***

Make sure you save TWO files.

Before you save the animated gif version (.gif), it’s vital you preserve all the frames/layers, so you can edit them easily later on …

To do that, save with the same filename, but add “.xcf” (this is the GIMP’s own file extension).

So, you’ll have two files, for the one animated image:

1. technicallyeasy-promo-1.xcf (editable)
2. technicallyeasy-promo-1.gif (layers flattened. But this is your animated image, which you’ll upload to your website).

Now comes that learning curve, eh?
Gimp’d Chess Website recently posted…Aug 28- The Notorious Chess Glossary – Chess-Game-Strategiescom

Nothing beats Photoshop in the long run though. If you are even remotely serious about quality graphic design, you should invest in it.

The great thing about Photoshop is it has a “Save for web” feature which dramatically cuts file size while still being able to keep good image quality. Helps for when you need to add some images to your website or blog post.