How do you do .gif images?

name says all any help would be appreciated.

thanks illmare

GIMP is a little different, so I'll add that in case someone has the same question, uses GIMP, and stumbles upon this topic.

For basic one image to another animation you make all your images first, save them as .xcf, then open them as layers in the order you want them to appear. Then open a dialog window for layers and merge the modification layers until your image is just one layer, and do this for each image you want, i.e. image 1 = layer 1, image 2 = layer 2, etc. If you want a fade animation, first you open your base image as a layer, and modify what you want. Then you merge the layers to one layer and duplicate it say ten times, and adjust the opacity for each layer by 10% each time, so first is 100%, next 90%, then 80% all the way to 10%. Now if you want to make sure the full picture stays up longer you should duplicate that layer a few times and leave it's opacity at 100%, then start lowering by 10% each time. Then you pick your next image as a new blank layer, modify it as you like, merge the modifications to one layer, and duplicate it again ten times repeating the process for the first. Finally you save as a .gif from the drop-down list, choose animation, set the quality to max, and set the frame delay. The frame delay determines how long a layer is left up before it moves to the next, for smooth animation you'll need to set this delay very low, one-tenth of a second max. You can set a longer delay in a separate scale for a certain frame or frames. Then all that's left is to save it and you're done. Getting the frame delay takes some trial and error, but you'll get it eventually.