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Animating GIFs on the Desktop

$9.99/month, or as part of a Creative Cloud subscription
Windows | Mac
If you're a true artist, making all your individual animation cells by hand, then you've probably got Photoshop. Using Adobe's image editor, versions CS3 on up, to create an animated GIF is almost as simple as opening a new image file. A 72 pixel-per-inch resolution is all you need for display on the Web.

Photoshop will also import videos in MPEG, MP4, AVI, and MOV formats. When you import a vid, select Video Frames to Layers to get only a few select frames—the fewer you use, the smaller the animated GIF. If you have troubles, there's no lack of animated GIF creation tutorials for Photoshop that exist online. And finally, a tool that lets you add text to an animated GIF!
Photoshop might seem like overkill for casual animations, but it's perfect for creating cinemagraphs, a form of animated GIF meant to look like a photo with a limited bit of realistic movement. Read this fantastic tutorial on creating them (by masking select areas of the primary image), and check out some of the best examples online at, of course, cinemagraphs.com.

Free
Windows | Mac | Linux
Don't want to shell out for Photoshop? GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) can handle just about all the animated GIF tasks you could imagine. It recognizes animated GIF files as a file with multiple layers (one layer for each frame), which makes it easy to resize the whole file as needed. Thus, when creating an animated GIF from scratch, it's as easy as adding new layers. And you can use it to add text to an animation, for memes galore. With GIMP, you can also specify whether the file should loop (not all of them should, people), and even specify a different delay time between frames. That provides some pinpoint precision to your work. Note that to make this all work, you need the GIMP Animation Package.


Pay What You Want
Windows
You don't have to pay for this amazing little utility for capturing areas of your screen and turning them into animated GIFs. But you'll probably want to (paying will also get rid of the watermark placed at the bottom of each animation). It takes a little practice to get just right, but with the Giffing Tool floating menu at the ready, you can capture anything on your screen—a video, your own cursor moving about, etc.—and turn it into an animated GIF. That's great for making quick tutorials ("Click HERE, mom!") but Giffing Tool supports much more than quick and dirty GIFs. You can trim the captured animation, delete or add frames, or get artsy with the cinegraph function. The tool will allow editing of existing animated GIFs as well. The interface it a little clunky but once mastered, you'll be happy with the results.


Free
Windows
How to Make Animated GIF - GifCamGifCam is like Giffing Tool, meant to capture some of your screen real estate in action—but it's got a better capture interface. Unlike Giffing Tool, which starts recording the minute to you select an area of the screen, with GifCam you can position the overlay just where you want and still interact with the rest of the screen before you start recording. There's also editing features built in, including adding basic captions, cinegraphing so only select parts of the animation move, and the ability to reduce the colors all the way to true monochrome black & white.


$5
Mac
Most of the tools you'll find for making animated GIFs are free, but not this beloved tool that's also Mac-only (and available in Apple's Mac App store). It's not for creating animations from scratch, but strictly for converting video files to animation. It's got the tricks like setting the frame delay manually, optimizing colors, changing how many times the animation loops, or doing a "palindrome" loop where it goes forward and backward. Plus it supports text caption creation on the animation, and filters for images.


$29.95
Windows
It's a steep price compared to many here, but cheaper than Photoshop and, for serious, from-scratch GIF Animators, maybe the best of its kind. The importing is limited to stills for stitching together to make a toon: GIF Movie Gear doesn't convert video clips into frames. However, what you can control per frame with this software is pretty great. Used in conjunction with some of the tools that do import video, you'll have a killer animated GIF studio. GIF Movie Gear will also export to video formats like AVI, or to a layered image to use in Photoshop. Don't believe? Check out the 30-day trial version first.


Free
Chrome extension
Install this on the browser and every time you visit YouTube, an extra setting on the page will allow you to set a start and end time to create an animated GIF based on the video. It's a good-looking image, but comes out at 240 pixels wide. You then grab the download at Imgur.