GIMP is known as a free image editing software alternative to Photoshop. However, it’s a not merely an image editing tool. You can also use GIMP to create beautiful arts, as well as animated GIFs.

Especially for GIF, GIMP has a feature you can take advantage of to create animated GIFs. It takes less than 5 minutes to create an animated GIF in GIMP, as long as you have prepared all of the images you want to turn into GIF. In this example, I will demonstrate how to create an animated GIF banner in GIMP.

To get a better result, you can combine GIMP with Inkscape or your favorite drawing tool. You can use a drawing tool to create the material images before turning them into a single image, animated GIF.

To create an animated GIF in GIMP, you need an image as the core image. Assuming that you have prepared the images, launch GIMP and open the core image.

Once the core image is open in GIMP, open the rest of the images, but instead of choosing the Open option, you need to choose the Open as Layers option on the File menu to turn the images into new layers.

Now you should see the layers on the dockable panel. The amount is vary depending on the images you want to turn into GIF. The point is, each image should has its own layer. In my case, I have three layers since the number of images I want to turn into GIF are three.

Lastly, export the images into a single file in a GIF format. To do so, click the File menu and select Export As.

On the Select File Type section, be sure to select GIF image.

Done.You can now press the Export button. Following is the example of the animated GIF banner I created.

You can create better images than I did to be turned into GIF.