All over the internet, of course, in websites and blogs and social media. Today, you could hardly escape GIFs if you tried - they’re everywhere. Once they hit smart phone keypads, there was no stopping them. Whole platforms developed just to collect and share them. Designers and artists began exploring what they could do with them. Social media sites stopped shunning them. Technical quality improved and they became easier to create. But, somewhere between the birth of YouTube and the expansion of broadband - as the internet began to catch fire - they started coming into their own. The earliest animated GIFs were so crude that no serious web developer would consider using them. (That’s why it’s called an animated GIF instead, or a GIF animation.) But they are so useful for that one purpose that they’re now one of the most popular formats for images that will appear mainly on the internet. A GIF isn’t the same thing as a video - no audio, for starters. Today, though, we think of them primarily as short, looping animations. GIFs were well enough suited for their original purpose: displaying logos, line art, charts, and such on the web. One day, someone realized that if you put a series of images into a GIF and sequenced them properly, you would have a simple animation. Although the format was developed to display basic graphics, it can hold more than one image at a time. (In fact, GIFs were actually born two years before the World Wide Web.) As a relic of chat rooms, MySpace, and dial-up, they should have gone extinct long ago.īut this tech dinosaur is somehow more popular than ever, thanks to one thing: animation. The format was introduced by CompuServe back in 1987 - the digital Stone Age - to post simple graphics like stock market quotations. Although they can’t contain any audio, they can still be as bulky as an MP4 video file because they’re not compressed. The 8-bit format means they can only display 256 colors. And not necessarily an optimal one, at that. GIFs are really nothing but a type of image file. With the revised GIF on your computer, you're ready to insert it on a slide in PowerPoint.GIF - best pronounced like the peanut butter - stands for the Graphics Interchange Format. To play the animation, select the Slide Show menu and then select Play from Current Slide.ĭetermine how many times the animation loops gif extension, select the file, and then click Insert. Navigate to the location of the animated GIF you want to add, make sure the file name ends with a. On Home tab of the ribbon, under Insert, click Picture > Picture from File. You can insert a GIF file that is stored on your computer hard disk or in cloud storage (such as OneDrive). You can add an animated GIF to a PowerPoint slide as you would with any other picture file. With the revised GIF on your computer, you're ready to insert it on a slide in PowerPoint. Below the revised GIF is a row of buttons, and the far right one is named save.Ĭlick save to copy the revised GIF back to your computer.ĭepending on your browser, the file will be saved to your Downloads folder or you'll be allowed to specify where you want the GIF file to be copied to on your computer. Under GIF options, in the Loop Count box, type a numeral representing the number of times you want the GIF to play.Īfter a few moments, the revised GIF is shown below the Make a GIF! button. Below the frames are more options, including one for Loop Count. The set of frames appears again, with a Skip, Copy, and Delay option for each frame. The animated GIF appears on the web page, followed by facts about the file size and dimensions, similar to this picture:Ĭlick the Split to frames button below the animated GIF.Īfter a moment, a frame-by-frame breakdown is shown on the web page.īelow the many frames (scroll downward on the page as needed), there's a blue Edit animation button. Select the file and then select the Open button.
Under Upload image from your computer, click the Browse button to locate the GIF file on your computer. Go to the GIF frame extractor (or "Splitter") on. Once you have the GIF file saved to your computer, a relatively easy way to edit the GIF is with the online editor called. But you can change that by editing the GIF before you add it to your PowerPoint slide. Determine how many times the animation loopsĪnimated GIFs often loop repeatedly without end.
On the Insert tab of the ribbon, choose Insert Online Pictures or Insert Clip Art. You can also search the web for GIFs by using Insert Online Pictures or Insert Clip Art, depending on your version of PowerPoint. To play the animation, select the Slide Show tab on the ribbon, and then, in the Start Slide Show group, select From Current Slide In the Insert Picture From dialog box, navigate to the location of the animated GIF you want to add. In the Insert tab of the ribbon, click Pictures. Select the slide that you want to add the animated GIF to.