The Ultimate Guide to Animating Photos: Top 8 Tools and Software

FREE 8 Best Tools to Make Animated Photo Easily

Shanoon Cox

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

It’s no wonder that the newest technology that includes animated photos or says GIFs have taken center stage.

What if you want to create some animated photos with free-to-use animated video software of your choice? These loops are hilarious sometimes and can express what words can’t. Are you wondering the same?

Well! You can do this yourself now. With the help of this article, we will make you acquainted with some really useful animated photo makers that will give information on how to animate a picture. Let’s start grasping those tools and begin making our GIFs.

• Part1: Best Animated Photo Maker on Phone
• Part2: Best Animated Photo Maker to make GIF

Recommended animated tool: Filmora

If you want to have more controls on animation photos, we recommend using Filmora .

You can use cartoon effects to make an animated photo with one click. You need to import your photo to start making animation easily. Besides, color correction and an audio mixer will raise your animated photo to a new level. Free download it to have a try!

Note: You can use Filmora to make animated photos by adding keyframes if you have more controls.

Part 1: Best Animated Photo Maker on Phone

First, we would like to introduce you to some apps that will help you do picture animation on your phone in this section.

1. Animate Me

The first animation image-maker is Animate me, which is enjoyable for only iPhone users. In other words, this app can only be installed on an iOS device.

You can create funny videos, e-Cards, or animate any kind of picture. In the e-Cards, you can add any face to make it more appealing and entertaining. This app can be used to animate yourself, your pets, or anyone you wish.

It is an amazing app that is worth giving a try to make others laugh by creating amazing GIFs.

Features of Animate Me

• The app offers more than 100 new e-Cards and adds new cards weekly.
• You can add multiple sounds for each character and get them talking too.
• In addition, there are ‘Hero masks’ available that you can use on your character’s face.

Cons

• Sometimes, the crash happens while you open it
• Navigation is not clear between different tabs

2. Loopsie

Loopsie is yet another picture animation maker available for both Android and iPhone users. This is one of the best photo and video creation apps used on a mobile phone.

Loopsie is free to use and is a mix of pictures and videos.

Features of Loopsie

• Along with being extremely easy to use, it provides output resolutions that are completely socially ready.
• One can do direct sharing on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp.
• There will be no need for a tripod while working with this app to make creative photos or videos.

Cons

• The imported videos will rank randomly
• Lacks enough guide on its website

3. Picstun

The next picture animation maker is Picstun, for Android device users. This is a professional photo animator app giving awesome animated video effects that can be applied to a picture to animate it.

Download this app and give a creative look to your picture.

Features of Picstun

• This app gives the option to crop or rotate your image and numerous animated video effects added to a photo and animate it.
• You can preview your file once before saving it. Also, you can save it on your SD card easily.
• It allows you to share your output file to various social platforms like Facebook, Gmail, YouTube, etc.

Cons

• Sometimes, it will crash if you import too many photos
• The animated effects are limited

Part 2: Best Animated Photo Maker to make GIF

This section will update you with the software or programs to know how to animate a picture on a computer. Here are those.

1. GIF Brewery

GIF Brewery is free software for Mac users that offers a simple, easy, and intuitive user interface. Anyone can use it to make creative and amazing GIFs from videos since there is no video-making expertise needed for using it.

You can resize and crop your video and even set the preferred frame rate.

Features of GIF Brewery

• You can apply many captions or overlay pictures with this picture animation maker.
• Easy saving options and the files can be easily shared with iMessage or mail.
• There are amazing filters that can be applied to photos such as color correction.

Cons

• You can not remove individual frames while making GIF
• Bugs happen sometimes

2. GIFMaker.me

GIFMaker.me is one tool that can help you do photo animation online. This online animated photo maker allows the users to create GIFs, slideshows, animated videos with music effortlessly.

GIFMaker.me supports Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. You just need a web browser and need to upload your image.

Features of GIFMaker.me

• This tool gives the options of reducing size, reversing or resizing a GIF, merging, or separating multiple GIFs.
• There are options to set animation speed or canvas size.
• There is no requirement to register yourself to use this.

Cons

• The interface is not easy to navigate
• The maximum number of images you can upload is 300

3. GIF Toaster

Another GIF maker app is GIF Toaster, which claims to be the best quality GIF maker app ever. You are just 4 steps away from creating your creative GIF when using this app. Choose the photo you want to convert into GIF and then set encoding options. Start encoding and then choose the ‘GIF’ tab to give your picture GIF effect.

Features of GIF Toaster

• The app can change any media format into GIF.
• It creates the GIF without compromising in quality.
• It’s available in English, Korean, and Japanese languages.

Cons

• Start and stop arrows are not easy to tap
• Rarely it can’t access Camera Roll Album

4. Animated GIF Maker

This picture animation maker or GIF maker is also an online tool. You can upload images up to 6MB. This means you can execute the photo animation online by just moving to your web browser.

Features of Animated GIF Maker

• This app allows you to upload multiple files at a time.
• It can convert even different formats and sizes into GIFs.
• After making GIF, you can customize it by resizing or cropping.

5. 3Dthis

The last, but certainly not the least, picture animation maker on today’s list of best tools to make photo animation online is 3Dthis. With this online tool, you can easily create 3D models and morph animations quite quickly.

Features of 3Dthis

• With this web app, you can create print-ready 3D designs.
• It allows you to morph your images for 3D modeling effectively.

Bonus tip: Create an Animation Video with Anireel

Anireel provides a faster and smoother animated video creation experience with customizable elements to bring anyone’s imagination to life. Users can create intuitive, fun, and innovative animation-centric explainer videos using many customizable elements for knowledge base and communication. You can use a drag-and-drop editor to add props, actions, characters, and audio to videos. There are pre-set animation templates for the main users to utilize and benefit from.

Final Verdict

We hope your question, “how to animate a picture,” has now the answer. Not one, we gave multiple solutions to this question. We provided you with some best GIF makers, including Filmora, that can be used on different platforms. You can easily get what you long for with these animated photo makers. So enjoy doing animations and creating funny and useful GIFs. Thanks for reading this post.

Shanoon Cox

Shanoon Cox is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Shanoon Cox

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