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How to Create Gifs That Blast Reader Engagement Through TheRoof

Whether eye-catching, irritating, or actually useful, there’s no denying them. Gifs have never been more popularthan they are right now.

Why’s this? It could be because mobile phones dropped Flash support. It might be because they’re so immediateand will automatically ‘play’ without the friction of a click. I think it’s both of these things, but most of all it’s becauseyou can say more with a gif than you can with actual words. Gifs help us make connections with our audience, toexplain, engage, entertain and tell stories. And, not to mention boost reader engagement

I’ve been using many, many gifs in my blog posts recently, partially thanks to the fact that I’ve been exposed to manymore since we added Giphy to our Slack on that fateful June 26th.

Anyway, Giphy has caused enough distraction for one lifetime. Time to crack on with the post and share with youwhat I’ve learned about using and creating gifs in blog posts.

Well, there’s Giphy, of course…

If the gif you’re looking for already exists, then you’ve hit the jackpot! Maybe you’ve thought of a paragraph that goesperfectly with a moment from a film…

… Or wanted to lighten the mood a little.

Giphy (the Google of gifs) has a huge amount of gifs uploaded by users, and some scraped then automaticallytagged from around the web. Go there now and search for your favorite film. Unless you’re only a fan of FrenchMarxist Art House cinema, there are probably several famous clips immortalized in animation.

There are, however, some limitations. If you like your images to be full-width (as we’d prefer here at Process Street),then Giphy’s images are just too low res for your needs. If you find that to be a problem, you’ve got a couple ofoptions.

Edit the image code to stretch the gif to 100% width (there will be some distortion)Somewhere in there you should see something like width="420" — that wants changing towidth="100%". Don’t forget to remove the height attribute entirely, or you’ll end up with a distortedmonstrosity.

Find the clip elsewhere and make your own, hi-res gif. If that’s what you want to do, you’re in the exact rightpart of the article, because the rest of it is going to be about the DIY approach.

…But making your own gets you better quality gifs!

There are a couple of ways to create gifs for your blog if they don’t already exist — and many tools at your disposal,too. I’m going to run through a few of these and some ways to use them for optimal giffery.

The disgusting-sounding LICEcap

Similar in hilarity to another open source beauty, LAME, fortunately, it’s better than it sounds. LICEcap is not anawful hat. In fact, it stands for Lightweight Image Composition Engine, and it’s a fantastic little tool to grab sectionsof your screen and save them as gifs of any length you like.

I used it to capture myself writing this blog post, and it works like a charm. In honesty, I use LICEcap for 80% of mygif requirements. It’s all well and good until it needs editing in some way, or, if you get your mouse in the way like Ialways do. That’s when it gets more complicated and you’ll have to edit it with some other tool. (More on that later.)

The illegal-sounding YouTube-to-Gif

Since LICEcap can be a bit of a pain when recording Youtube as gifs without editing, sometimes you just want to getthe job done without desperately trying not to get your mouse in the shot or accidentally cause YouTube’s pushyoverlay to crop up and ruin your perfectly loopable specimen.

For these moments, there’s Make A Gif ’s Youtube-to-Gif creator. Here’s a quality one from Laurie Anderson’s OSuperman. I just knocked it out using that app, and it’s watermarked so you know I’m not lying.

Replace ’youtube.com’ with ’gifs.com’ in any URL

Gifs.com (formerly gifyoutube.com) is a service which can create a gif out of any section of a video on YouTube. Toget there quickly, just edit out the ‘youtube’ section of your URL and replace it with ‘gifs’.

So, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2x5pARGdE becomes https://gifs.com/watch?v=QH2x5pARGdE

From there, gifs.com will load you up a quick editor where you set the start time and duration and off you go. This isa nicer looking, non-watermarked alternative to Make A Gif, and something I used to capture this rare footage of thelads at the match.

…And back round to Giphy

Something I omitted earlier: Giphy can make gifs too! The reason I omitted it, even though it’s a user-friendly way todo it, is because the gifs it makes are pretty small and seem capped at ~480px wide.

Even still, if you’re churning out a quick gif and don’t want to spend ages on it, it’s a good solution.

Get a little more complex with Photoshop

So, what happens if you want a gif of an exact size, with frames chopped out the middle, text overlays, and all sortsof other complicated nonsense? Unfortunately for those who like simple solutions such as the ones I’ve alreadyexplained, that’s not as easy as I’d like it to be.

Here’s the step-by-step to making something like the header on this post!

1. Grab your selection with LICEcap. The higher quality the initial material is, the better it’ll come out. Zoom inawkwardly on the YouTube page if it helps, and make sure to keep your mouse not only out of shot, but out ofthe way entirely.

Put your mouse in the corner somewhere and use shift + space to start the recording. Be wary that you’ll have tosave the file before it starts recording, and then there’s 3 seconds of pre-roll before the capture goes live. Timing is,unfortunately, a big part of it.

2. Open the resulting .gif file in Photoshop. Add a new text layer to the on top of everything else. For me, that’slayer 70-something!

3. Play it through. Does it look right? Don’t just save it as a .gif and expect it to work, now. You have to ‘Save forWeb and Devices’ by pressing Ctrl+Shft+Alt+S

4. Press ‘Save’ in the dialog and give it a name. You’re ready!

If you’re looking to do more than just add text, then don’t worry. All you have to understand to take it further is thatthe frames of the gif are treated as layers in Photoshop, so by editing those layers (only one of which isn’t hiddenper frame, by default), you can have a lot of control over what your gif looks like.

…Or quick, rough edits using Ezgif

If you don’t have the patience to figure out how to interpret what you want into the right clicks in Photoshop, Ezgif isa powerful alternative.

Resize, crop, reverse, speed up, split and overlay text on gif files in a few minutes. While it’s not as customizable asPhotoshop, it’s a quick way to whip up an edit if your source material isn’t quite right.

For how-tos, gifs are better than screenshots

If you’re demonstrating how to use a product, whether that’s yours or something you’re writing about, gifs show quickextracts of the user flow much more effectively than images and with less friction than a full demo video.

Instead of saying ‘go to Process Street, find the right folder, etc…’, a gif for a few seconds will do.

The method is exactly the same: Use LICEcap to capture a segment of your screen (squeeze the window size downto get a clean view) and hit record.

Alright?

Alright. Nice.

Go have fun with it.