gimp stuff

note to self I wanted to make my Twitter profile pic. animate. :-) It's quite easier than it might look, even I could get it done without much trouble! All that is necessary, is a bunch of photos in the sequence you want them to be animated. Easier if they are saved inside a single directory to minimize going back-n-forth looking for them. So, here is what you do. 1. Open up the 1st image in the sequence on Gimp. 2. Go to "File" on this newly opened up image window and select "Open as Layers..." and select the rest of the images to open. 3. Select "Rectangle Select Tool" and select a rectangular area with the content you want to have. ( Exact size of the rectangle in pixels will appear at the bottom part of the window. 4. Once the selection is made, go to "Image" either on the Top Menu bar or right-click context menu, and Select "Crop to Selection" 5. Now, go to "Filters" > "Animation" > "Optimize (for GIF)". This will open up a new window with the image. 6. Just to check how it will look in the end, once again go to "Filters" > "Animation" > "Playback" and play the animation step by step. -just hitting play is not that helpful cuz. frames move on quite fast. 7. Now save the file as a .gif & In the "Export File" dialogue, Select "Save as Animation" 8. In the "Save as GIF" dialogue select the option "Loop Forever" depending how you want it, and also give a decent amount of milliseconds as the delay between the frames. Also, check the tick box "Use delay entered above for all frames" :-) That's pretty much it! Check the file size before uploading it to twitter cuz. twitter has some limitation on the Profile Image size..I think 700Kbs. Used Gimp, cool tool it is!