I’m starting to see a bit of a trend. It seems my Saturday blogs tend to fall under the category of Creative Clicks. That’s OK, though don’t you think? After all, Saturdays are supposed to be fun (at least in my world). I find photo manipulation and image editing fascinating and enjoy taking a few moments during the week to be digitally creative. The following resources will help you transform your photographs or images into fun and interesting .gif animations. These applications might be interesting to share with art students. Wouldn’t it be neat to see what kinds of animated gifs young artists create using their drawing/scanning skills?
LooGix.com – this easy-to-use application makes an animated gif in a jif (sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun). Simply select an effect, upload your photograph(s) and voila! After you generate an animation click the “Save to disk” link to save your animation to your computer. You can also share your images by sending a link to the image, upload your image to a gallery, or use the 
provided embed code to post your image on a website or social site. If you create an image you really like, I would suggest that you save it to your computer. Images are removed from the site after three months. A brief word of caution…the gallery section of this site could include images that were inappropriate in content. When I previewed the site I did not notice any inappropriate images, but that doesn’t mean they won’t appear at some time in the future. I have posted a few of my “play” samples below…
Gickr Photos in Motion – this application does not offer as many options as LooGix.com, but it does a nice job 
creating “mini movie”-type-animations. Upload up to 10 images, select or customize a size for your animated image, select a speed, click on the continue link, and WAIT (patiently, or impatiently, but make sure you wait or this application will not work). The resulting image can be saved to your computer, embedded on a web page (see samples below), or sent as a link to friends.
GIFUP.com – this application is described as a personal GIF animation and avatar generator. “Simply capture photo with your webcam or upload images from 
your computer or get them from Flickr or any web site and let GIFUP do all the magic. You get your animated avatar, banner or GIF slideshow in a sec! You may then save it to your computer, share it with your friends or post it on Myspace, Hi5, Friendster, Blogs, Forums, etc.” The animation generator portion of the site is very similar to the other applications mentioned in this post, but you also have an option with this application to capture images and sound using your webcam and microphone. You will also notice that all the animations you create include a gifup logo. If you are not using the webcam function I would recommend that you use a different animation generating application.
You can also sign up for a free account if you would like to manage your images, but the account is not required to create an animation or avatar. As for the avatar generator….to be honest, I do not recommend . I thought it was a pointless search tool that could be used to find a limited number of pre-cropped images. It might be handy if you are looking for a quick avatar to upload while joining a social site, but I am just as happy creating my own avatar using an editing program. I created a very simple animation and included it below…
Gifmake – this generator wins my award for cutest logo and it is very hand for creating larger slide-show-type animations, but I did not find it very intuitive. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to upload more than one image. Here is the secret: click the upload 
button on the left hand of the screen (it’s red and you can’t miss it, but I kept looking for an upload function following the choose file box). This animation generator is also nice because you can tweak the intervals for the photographs, so they flash at shorter or longer intervals. Contact the company for a superuser password if you would like to create an animation that is larger than 500×500 pixels. I have posted a sample I created using this application below…
Picasion – use this application to create animated GIFs online for free! “Upload your pictures or grab them from Flickr or Picasa Web, make avatars or funny animations that can be posted to MySpace, LiveJournal, Bebo, Digg, Facebook etc. No need for Flash.”
gifNinja – I can’t believe I missed this ninja site when I wrote my Ninja post! This free online .gif making tools can be used to convert your video or images. You can also view other users animations by rank or by most recently made. This was the only application that I came across that included a .gif splitter tool which allows users to dissect .gifs into seperate images and mix them up.