Splitting a Gif Animation

One of our course project teams wants to have a flash learning object made based on an idea from a gif animation. In order to prepare the storyboard for the flash animators, the team wants to be able to access the individual pictures from the animation. The storyboard will be created in PowerPoint using the template we've been working on so the images from the animation are fine as gifs, jpg's or bmps.

There are many programs that will extract the individual images used in an animated gif. I wanted to find a product that did not have a lot of 'overhead' (like photoshop which is a large program that takes up a lot of space in the computer's memory and takes forever to load) and one that was very simple to use. I opted for "Gif Splitter". It is freeware available here: http://www.xoyosoft.com/gs/index.htm

Here are the steps involved:

Part 1 - Installing the Program
1) Download the zip file from the site identified above.
2) Unzip the file (you will need a program such as winzip installed on your computer) by extracting the files into their own folder in a place you will remember on your computer (I extracted all the files into a folder called 'gifsplitter'.)
3) That's it for installing the program.. you will not be able to access the program from you "start" button unless you create a special link to it. Instead, you will have to click on the GifSplitter.exe file in the folder where you extracted all the files from the zip file.

Part 2 - Extracting the images from an Gif Animation.
1) Create a folder where you want to 'dump' your extracted images from the animation. I will call my folder "stickmanpics"
2) If the gif animation you want to use for this exercise is on the web, right click on the image and select "save image as". Save the gif to the folder you created in step 1. If you have already saved the gif animation, move it now to the new folder you created.
3) Go to the folder where you extracted your the GS.Zip file (the GifSplitter download file) and double click on the GifSplitter.exe file. You will see a box appear like the one below:


4) Select the gif you want to split up. (See #1 in the image above)...You will need to find your new folder and then select the gif animation from within it.

5) Now you must identify the folder where you want the extracted to go. It is best to let the program do this for you. Click the "Auto Fill" check box (See #2 below).


6) Now you are ready to "split". Click the "Split Now" button (see #3 above) . The individual pictures will be placed in the subfolder you created by clicking on the "Auto Fill" box. The subfolder will be created within the folder where you placed your gif animation. Each extracted image will be sequentially numbered. You will know the animation is being split up because the "STATE" will show each of the frames (or individual pictures) extracted (see #4 in the image above).

7) Now open the folder where your animate gif was located, within the subfolder created by "Gifsplitter" you will see many images of a *.bmp format. Those are your individual images! (See my folders and files below)



8) You are now ready to import the individual bitmaps (*.bmp files) into your PowerPoint storyboard as you see fit.

Enjoy!