With social media and sharing content with friends becoming the norm of the day, people keep coming up with new and unique ways to say what they’re trying to say. The closest example we can cite for this case is animated GIFs. All you need to do is scroll down your Facebook page a little to spot at least one hilarious GIF someone has shared. Even on WhatsApp, GIFs are the new craze. From commenting on posts to reacting with witty one-liners, everything is being achieved with custom GIFs these days.

If you’ve ever wondered how people seem to find the perfect funny GIFs to share on the exact right moment, well, you’re not alone. A lot of people (including us) have been looking for a way to create our very own GIFs with custom images and we’ve found just the tool that can help. Say Hi to ezGIF – the online GIF maker and image editor. Let’s find out all there is to know about this tool.

ezGIF – Suite of tools for GIFs

ezGIF started off as a simple online GIF maker tool but has evolved into a whole suite of tools for GIF editing. Creating, resizing, cropping, reversing, optimizing, and applying some effects to GIFs, you can do anything with it. Classified as one of the best post production tools, this is the go-to product if you really want to turn your GIFs around. It works with images as well as videos (not YouTube links, yet), lets you play around with GIF size, make them more effect-y flip them horizontally or vertically, add overlay texts, change their speed – basically do almost anything you can think of when it comes to GIFs.

Here’s a quick look at the different tools packed within the ezGIF suite:

• GIF Maker – Allows you to combine separate image files as frames to create your own animated GIFs.
  • You can also edit, shorten or merge existing GIFs.
  • Additionally, you can upload JPG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF and they will be converted automatically
  • Supports PDF files or ZIP archive with images
• Video to GIF – Allows you to upload your mp4, AVI, WEBM, FLV, WMV and many other popular types of video and rich media files to turn them into animated GIFs.
  • Source video file can be uploaded from your computer or Smartphone or fetched by URL
  • Lets you crop the video by entering start and end time
• GIF Resizer – Lets you resize, crop, or flip animated gifs and other images, with the same quality and speed as professional software, without the need to buy and install anything.
  • Lets you select the action to perform if the aspect ratio of the source image and your chosen size does not match
  • Supports resizing of animated WEBP, APNG, FLIF and MNG files (and any other common image type) without losing animation
• Optimizer – Lets you optimize GIF images in one of 4 ways:
  • Reduce GIF file size by compressing them using Lossy GIF compression
  • Reduce GIF file size by reducing the number of colors in each frame
  • Reduce GIF file size by removing every second, third, or fourth frame to reduce frame rate and, therefore, file size
  • Reduces GIF file size by keeping the first frame in the background, and making unchanged parts of the following frames transparent

In addition to these primary tools, ezGIF also includes GIF to Sprite Converter and Sprite Sheet Cutter to play around with CSS Sprites that can be posted directly on websites.

How the various tools within ezGIF work

Visit ezgif.com and choose one of the 4 primary products indicated in the upper center of the screen. Let’s pick each up one by one.

GIF maker

1. Click on “GIF Maker” on the home page to reach the work page
2. Choose the files with which you wish to create GIF. You can choose multiple files by pressing and holding ctrl / command key
3. Click on “Upload and make a GIF”
4. You will now be redirected to the editing page. Here, make the desired changes like:
   1. Change image order (drag and drop)
   2. Set time delay for each image (in milliseconds)
   3. Resize to make all images of the same size
   4. Toggle the range of frames
   5. Set Loop Count (how many times do you want the GIF to repeat playing)
   6. Additional effects (crossfade frames to include a smooth transition effect, or remove frame stacking)
5. When all edits have been made, click on “Make a GIF”
6. After a few seconds your GIF should display in the a box a little lower on the page
7. You can make changes to the GIF (crop, resize, optimize, speed, etc.) after it is created

Video to GIF

1. Click on “Video to GIF” on the home page to reach the work page
2. Choose the video (from computer or Smartphone) with which you wish to create GIF
3. Click on “Upload Video” (maximum upload size is 120 MB)
4. You will now be redirected to the editing page. Here, make the desired changes like:
   1. Cut any undesired parts of the video
   2. Enter start and end time (if you don’t select anything, the GIF will be created with the first 5 seconds of the video)
5. When all edits have been made, click on “Make a GIF”
6. Depending upon the size of the video and your edits, after a little while your GIF should display in a box a little lower on the page
7. You can make changes to the GIF (crop, resize, optimize, speed, etc.) after it is created

GIF Resizer

1. Click on “GIF Resizer” on the home page to reach the work page
2. Choose the image you wish to resize (GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, WebP, APNG, FLIF, MNG)
3. Click on “Upload”
4. Once file has been uploaded, click on “Resize”
5. Depending upon the size of the image after a little while your resized image should display in a box a little lower on the page

Optimizer

1. Click on “Optimizer” on the home page to reach the work page
2. Choose the image you wish to optimize (GIF, JPG, PNG)
3. Click on “Upload”
4. You will now be redirected to the editing page. Here pick which technique you wish to use to optimize the image:
   1. Lossy GIF Compression
   2. Color Reduction
   3. Removing every nth frame
   4. Optimize Transparency
5. When all edits have been made, click on “Optimize”
6. After a little while your optimized image should display in the a box a little lower on the page

That’s pretty much it.

The Good VS the Bad

The good points of this tool are many and don’t need to be recounted.

There are no bad sides as such, only some features that would be good to have, like the ability to upload videos larger than 120 MB, or YouTube link support.

• Create, edit, resize, & optimize animated GIFs easily with @ezgif_com ezgif.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Verdict

Considering that the tool lets you do everything for free, we’d say it’s definitely worth it. It works great and does exactly what it promises – delivers great GIFs! Double thumbs up.

None of us would like to stay glued to a blank screen and thus to make your website or application more attractive you would like to add a Preloader. A preloader is nothing but a loading bar or circular tab that indicates what percent of content is loaded and keeps the viewer informed that the content he has requested is being loaded. Most of the people consider that addition of a preloader isn’t good for a website or app as it is not good to keep your customers or visitors waiting.  But adding Preloaders allows you to entertain your visitor by adding a creative and mind boggling Preloader.

Preloaders are also called as loading gif, loading icons, AJAX Loaders or AJAX Loading Icons. These AJAX loading icons are usually used on AJAX based sites and applications for informing the visitor about the information that has been loaded. There are some websites available online which offer online tools to generate a JavaScript or CSS3 based preloader images while on the other hand there are many such websites which offer a collection of animated loading icons and one similar website is Preloaders.net this website has a collection of many wonderful and creative Preloaders.

Preloaders.net makes it easier to create a Preloader and has these Preloaders divided into many categories like 3D, Science, Religion, Smileys, People, Animated Text, Zodiac and more. Preloaders.net allows you to select the preloader, change the image type to GIF or APNG. Add transparent background, change foreground colors and background colors, change the animation speed and size of your preloader.

On clicking upon the advanced options tab it offers various options like inverting colors of the preloader, flip image horizontal or vertical, you can use environment colors and even reverse animations. It also allows you to change the amount of frames and generate the Preloaders automatically.

Steps to generate your own Preloader

• Select the kind of preloader you would like to have on your website or application from the dropdown list.
• Select the image type i.e. GIF or APNG. On selecting GIF you would get a Preloader with GIF extension and APNG option would generate an animated PNG image on clicking the generate Preloader button. GIF supports absolute and no transparency at all. Selecting the GIF format and would let you to add background colors to even the semitransparent parts of the image.
• Select whether you want to have transparent background for your image.
• Select the foreground color or the color of the Preloader and this color can be selected using the color picker for the foreground.
• Add Background color and select using the color picker for the background color of the Preloader.
• Select proper animation speed by dragging the blue button towards the + which would increase the speed or – which would decrease the speed of the animation.
• Size of the preloader should be selected next. The image is set to best quality and the maximum size of each preloader is loaded by default when it is selected from the dropdown.
• Keep the original colors option allows you to keep the colors of your Preloaders as it is without any changes.

Some Special Effects

• Invert all colors allows you to invert the colors of your image.
• Flip image flips the image vertically or horizontally. Many of the images containing symmetrical objects would not be effected by this effect as they are absolutely symmetric.
• Using environment colors you can add the background color to the preloader image too.
• To set the sequence of animation in reverse order you can use the reverse animation option.
• The amount of frames in the image which is generated should be always reduced by 4, 8 or 16 to keep up with the quality of the animation.
• Generate automatically allows you to generate Preloaders automatically 2 seconds after you make any change to the parameters.

They also have an older version of the application called Preloaders.net v1 which has lesser number of categories of Preloaders and may take some time to generate these images.

Request your own Preloader

Preloader.net allows you to upload a Preloader preview image with desired Preloader name and email id if you would want to request a Preloader for your upcoming project. People at Preloaders even allow you to select urgency of your request so that extremely urgent needs could be done with without wasting much time.

No Copyright Issues!

Preloaders.net encourages its users to use any animated GIF and APNG images generated on the website as these are can be used by anyone in any project without any fee and without any copyright or piracy issues too. You can also add a reference to Preloaders in your project but that is not a compulsion unlike other similar websites.

The Discussion Board

Preloaders also has a discussion board where you can discuss issues which you face while generating a Preloader for your project. The Discussion Board is a place where the Preloader team responds to your queries and problems you face while working on the website. You can see third party advertisements on the website which is through Google and can be hidden if you would like to experience an advertisements free version of the website.

• Experience a hassle free way of creating a website preloader with @preloadersnet preloaders.net/ via @supermonitoring

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Request API Key

You can also request Preloaders for an API key for which you would receive instructions on how to get the generator or creator for your website and application with dynamic options and without any need to save the file to the servers. One API key is allowed to generate 5000 Preloaders in a day. Since Preloaders is free to use they even allow companies and individuals to have API keys for free.

This website launched in February 2008 by Timur Gafforov and Avraam Makhmudov has generated more than 16 Million Preloaders and is visited by more than 15,000 people daily. I would recommend you to at least give it a try and you may experience a hassle free way of creating a website preloader that too in a creative and attractive manner.