I remember back in the day when I used windows I used a program called Ulead GIF animator which was pretty nice for making animations and what not.

I am trying to find something like this for Linux but my search has come empty, most of them are either not available on my distro in the package manger, or are completely unintuitive. I found one called pencil that looks like it would do what I want but it's far from being intuitive. It feels very limited. You import an image sequence, it just plops it wherever, and you can't easily change the location, and even if you could, you would have to do each frame (1000's) individually. You would think it would let me drag and drop where to drop the first frame so it puts all of them in same location. Even basic things like changing the dimensions are not that intuitive, I did end up finding how via Google though.

Any other programs I may have missed? I'm using Mint so I want something that will be available in the package manager, as dealing with dependencies on something that does any form of multimedia is going to be a nightmare.

Basically I just want to be able to either animate something from scratch or use existing video and add animation to it, then be able to export it as a gif or other video format.

On the command line, there are ImageMagick (or GraphicsMagick), Gifsicle, and some tools for APNG format (apngasm, apngdis, apngopt, apng2gif, gif2apng).

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I was able to render a short clip to gif from Kdenlive using the default gif preset. Kdenlive also has the ability to import images/frames and export them out as a video or gif. ffmpeg is good for video-to-gif conversion if you want finer controls via cli: https://engineering.giphy.com/how-to...s-with-ffmpeg/. If you're producing each frame individually, this link will tell you how to use ffmpeg to put together the frames into a video: https://hamelot.io/visualization/usi...-into-a-video/.

As for drawing 2D animations, here's what I know top of my head: Kitra https://www.gamedesigning.org/animation/krita/. GIMP is another one (very basic animation): https://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Advanced_Animations/. Blender has a 2D animation ability, too. If you want kind of an Adobe After Effect clone (a compositing program), here's one: https://natrongithub.github.io/. You could also draw on papers, scan them in with your smartphone or a scanner, and use ffmpeg or kdenlive to put them together.

Hmmm never thought of using kdenlive, could work for my particular case where I just want to take a clip of a video, add text on it, then make a gif of it. Going to check Krita as well.

ffmpeg should also be able to convert to GIF.

So far nothing is very intuitive. The potential is there, but it's like nobody ever tries to test the work flow of this stuff when designing it. CAD is another place where intuitivity seems to take a back seat in Linux. It's too bad too.

Kdenlive does not appear to have a way to specify a fully custom resolution

Krita does not seem to have much options for animation. It allows to import frame and there is a sort of time line but no easy way to do anything. Even adding text is a weird experience, it drops you into a separate text box, you can't actually edit the text in real time to see how it will look like, can't resize move etc.

I did not really want to script it manually but for what I'm trying to do I suppose it will be the only way. I wrote a png library years back so I can use that to add the text to each image, then I can just use ffmpeg to make it back into a gif. That is super dirty and limited but for a one time thing it will work.

If I want to do anything more advanced looks like I'll be looking into writing my own application. Been meaning to learn GUI coding anyway as I often can't find a good desktop based program to do what I want so may as well write it and release it to public eventually.

Sounded like shruggy's recommendations are what you're looking for then. With imagemagick or gifsicle, you won't need ffmpeg to put the frames back together. If you google for it, you can make a script 'drag and drop'-able. If you want something intuitive, try your smartphone's app store. I've seen some gif apps in there but never tried them.

Attached is 200px by 200px 12 frames gif. Took me 20 minutes to make it.

Attached Thumbnails

 

Someone else post a sort of similar question to yours: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ss-4175706557/

Maybe the suggestions in it are what you're looking for.

I've heard an app called 'blender' is good for animation.

Probably of no interest to you, but I've been using a Windows app called PhotoScape for years. Initially from its first release in 2008 under XP, then under WINE when I moved to Linux at XP's EOL in 2014. It was a bit scrappy in those days, but with improvements in WINE it's become one of those rare 100% apps; absolutely everything works as it's supposed to. I became so handy with it under XP, I've kinda stuck with it ever since.

It has a GIF-maker 'module'; a time-line, where you drag-n-drop your images; you can set the display time for each frame, time-outs between frames (if required), and generally titivate the thing until it's how you want it, before eventually exporting as the finished item. I've never found anything remotely as easy to work with. FFmpeg is very powerful, but the command-lines/lists of switches required are an absolute nightmare to get right.

Just a thought. Maybe it's time somebody DID write something comparable for our side of the fence. It's a fact there's no getting away from; Linux & Windows both have their strong points. Windows can do stuff Linux can't, and Linux can run rings around MycrudSoft when it comes to other stuff.....

(*shrug*)

There IS 'Peek'. You can't use it to create your own GIFs, but it will record screen activity & save it directly AS a GIF. Perhaps study how this thing does what it does?

Mike.