A Graphics Interchange Format otherwise known as GIF is a standardized format that supports both animated and static images. GIFs are popularly used in social media and are resourceful when it comes to describing an event in a short time frame, creating comedy shorts among many others.
There are already a more than a few notable online-based GIF creators like Ezgif, gifmaker, and gifcreator with quite a number of them available on desktop platforms too.
GiftedMotion by Onyxbits, however, is the only known functional GUI-enabled GIF maker available on Linux. The application is extremely tiny, cross-platform and only depends on Java to run.
The software creates GIFs by merging multiple images together with no option for using videos – so if that’s the kind of thing you don’t mind using; otherwise, you’ll have to look up the other options available online.
Features as listed on its website
- Platform independent; runs on every OS.
- Multi-language support (English Deutsch Italiano Brasil Polnish )
- GPL software, no licensing costs.
- KISS approach. No steep learning curve.
- Supports the following input formats: PNG, JPG / JPEG, BMP, and GIF.
- Easy to adjust the position of images within frames and size of the resulting image.
- Preview function.
- Able to edit existing images
GiftedMotion requires no installation instruction. All you need to do is download Java as per your operating system and run the executable (download here) after you can execute the file as a program on Linux systems using following command.
$ java -jar giftedmotion-1.23.jar
Using GiftedMotion to Create GIF’s
I tried creating a GIF using a combination of cute dog pictures (cause feel cute cats are a little overrated) the result is a little underwhelming and i noticed this was solely due to the fact that the images aren’t of the same pixel dimension and there is no option in the settings to scale to your preferred image dimension.
So in essence, if you’re going to use the GiftedMotion effectively, you’ll have to use only images of equal heights and widths to avoid a result like the one above.
