EZ GIF Maker

CompuServe introduced the GIF image format way back on 15 June 1987. They needed to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas. The GIF image has progressed little since then, but people have gotten creative with it.

Now that you have a little history (more below if interested), let’s talk about a service called EZGIF.COM. This the best online animated GIF sites I have come across and I have used a many over the years. I have also used desktop software that does not do as good of a job.

I took an image created in Photoshop and made two colors for the text. To be 100% honest, I did a crappy design job, but you can see what the output from ezgif.com is on your left.

EZGIF editing tools feature file size optimization, cropping, rotating, cut, speed adjustment and more. The best feature for this ole man is how easy it is to use!

The service allows you to resize, cut, crop, rotate, speed adjustment, file size optimization, etc. One of the nice features is that most all are really easy to use and figure out.

The GIF was never designed as an animation medium, its ability to store multiple images into one file naturally suggested using the format to store the frames of an animation sequence. To facilitate displaying animations, the GIF89a spec added the Graphic Control Extension (GCE), which allows the images (frames) in the file to be painted with time delays, forming a video clip. Each frame in an animation GIF is introduced by its own GCE specifying the time delay to wait after the frame is drawn. Global information at the start of the file applies by default to all frames. The data is stream-oriented, so the file offset of the start of each GCE depends on the length of preceding data. Within each frame the LZW-coded image data is arranged in sub-blocks of up to 255 bytes; the size of each sub-block is declared by the byte that precedes it.