Best Apps for making Moving or Animated Gifs & Photos

Back when Myspace was bigger than Facebook, at the dawn of social media, you might be (unlucky) enough to remember the glitzy, prolific appearance of animated gifs and sparkly images on everybody’s profile pages. Back then they only made pages run slowly; they just got in the way.

 

Well, times have changed, and now animated photos have advanced to the point where some artists can earn decent amounts of cryptocurrency selling them as careful artworks (and limited editions) as crypto-collectibles on NFT sites like Opensea, Makersplace and Superrare.

 

This trend has been boosted in part thanks to the many smartphone apps which make it a breeze to bring photographs to living life, and we’ll recommend a few in this post. 

 

Why and Where to Display?

 

You can now purchase high-tech digital art frames for your walls that display moving images (via wi-fi) together with any static or famous masterpieces - or just personal photographs - you can change or cycle according to pre-sets.

 

But if you don’t fancy showing off art in the real world, there are several virtual venues with VR galleries where you can display your best work, or prized pieces in your collection, or even build your own gallery. These include: Somnium Space, CryptoVoxels and Decentraland. Virtual land and in-game assets are also bought and sold for some serious prices.

 

 

Whatever your reasons, be it for online media marketing reasons (perhaps in order to boost those ad campaigns and catch eyes), impressing Instagram friends and contacts, to showing off impressive wall art, this form of artwork and photography looks set to become a long-term expressive medium. Some may include memes that become viral art, re-posted across the web.

 

Top artists currently making animated images include Coldie, Daniel Ignacio, and Katy Arrington.

 

Make Your Own

 

If you have something to say or explore, you can make these images most precisely (and at highest resolution) using professional desktop animation programs. If you're bored during lockdown due to Covid-19, and need to feed your creative or constructive side, you might have lots of time to learn and acquire this software. But for those who don't spend all their time at a computer, it's not the easiest or most creative place to start.

 

credit: Ade's Press

 

Luckily, these days there are many simple and effective mobile apps out there, easy to master, that will enable you to transform your images, or bring them to life. They are the best way to start creating your own moving masterpieces, and could lead you to become a top artist working in this medium. You can find your art appearing inside virtual worlds and galleries.

 

Both the following 2 apps require an ongoing subscription to unlock all content, remove watermarks on output files, remove ads etc, but... they also have free trials so you can test them out. 

 

There are tons of photo apps, but a good place to start is with a mobile app like PhotoLab, although more designed for selfies and portraits for Instagram, its popularity has conjured up filters and backgrounds so wide and varied that you can spend hours enhancing any image. One touch will apply Photoshop-created effects that can really transform an image and give it a whole new life, setting, meaning or context.

 

For animating your images more carefully (into mp4 movie output or silent gifs) we recommend Enlight's Pixaloop Pro. 

 

 

Subscriptions to both these apps are well worth it, if you’re looking to make images quickly and easily via a smartphone. They will start you off into a world of artistic possibility.

 

Hint: To avoid getting lost in this sea of possibility that these apps present you with, it’s wise to try and focus. Try and start off with an intention or image in your mind (or a sketch) that you want to arrive at, and then begin using these apps towards this area. Otherwise you can spend too long adjusting old photos that may not be fit for purpose.

 

The final stage is to get signed up at Opensea or Makersplace etc, so you can start selling your best experiments online, or your static experiments and illustrations. Happy creating!

 

 

Here at Prizes Drop, we offer Paypal or Google Play vouchers for those collecting enough of points completing simple tasks like surveys and watching ads. You can use these points towards a subscription to an app like Pixaloop Pro and be on track to selling your first artwork online.

 

Scan through our blog to find other related articles on crypto-art and crypto-collectibles.