Create Animated GIFs with ImageMagick

Productivity Sauce

Animated GIFs are not only good for posting funny cat videos. They are also suitable for creating short sequences demonstrating a specific feature of an application or explaining how to use a certain tool. And using the mighty ImageMagick software, you can create animated GIFs with consummate ease. First of all, make sure that ImageMagick is installed on your system. The software is available in the repositories of all mainstream Linux distributions, so you can install it using your distro's package manager.

Next, take a series of screenshots and name them in the desired sequence (e.g., 001.png, 002.png, 003.png, etc.). Using the convert -resize 800x *.png command, you can resize all screenshots in one fell swoop (replace 800 with the desired width value in pixels). Switch then to the directory containing the screenshots, and run the command below to generate an animated GIF:

convert -delay 120 -loop 0 *.png animated.gif

The delay parameter specifies the delay between frames in milliseconds, while the loop parameter determines how many times the animation runs (the 0 value will run the loop infinitely).