Make a GIF from images

You have a few images — screenshots, drawings, frames exported from a video or a design tool — and want one animated GIF. GIFmeta turns them into a GIF in a few clicks or one command, on your own computer.

Before you start: all images must have the same width and height (for example 800 × 600). PNG, JPEG and WebP all work, and you can mix them.

With the desktop app

1. Open GIFmeta and click 🎬 New from images — or simply drop the image files onto the window.
2. The images appear in the frame list in the order you picked them. Drag the ⠿ handle (or press Alt + ↑/↓) to put them in the right order.
3. Set the speed: each frame shows for 10 cs (100 ms) by default. Change one frame in the viewer, or all frames at once under ⚙️ Settings → Delay for all frames.
4. Press ▶ Play to preview the animation.
5. Under Settings → Loop, keep Loop forever or choose how many times it plays.
6. Click 💾 Create GIF, pick a file name, and click again to save. The new GIF opens right away so you can keep editing it — insert more frames, duplicate one, or fine-tune timing.

With the command line

gifmeta create frame1.png frame2.png frame3.jpg -o animation.gif

The images become frames in the order you list them. Useful options:

# 200 ms per frame, but show the last frame for 2 seconds
gifmeta create intro.png step-*.png outro.png -o tutorial.gif --delay 20 --delays 5=200

# play three times instead of forever
gifmeta create a.png b.png -o once-more.gif --loop-count 3

Delays are in centiseconds (1 cs = 10 ms), so --delay 20 means 200 ms per frame.

Good to know

• Colours: a GIF frame can hold 256 colours. Images with ≤ 256 colours are stored exactly; photos and gradients are colour-reduced per frame (GIFmeta tells you which frames).
• Transparency: fully transparent pixels stay transparent, and each frame shows only its own image — nothing from the previous frame shines through. Semi-transparent pixels are drawn opaque, because GIF has no partial transparency.
• Different sizes? Resize the images to the same size first. GIFmeta tells you exactly which files differ.

In Rust

use gifmeta::{create_gif, CreateOptions};

create_gif(&["a.png".into(), "b.png".into()], CreateOptions {
    output: Some("out.gif".into()),
    delay: Some(20),
    ..Default::default()
})?;