Making Animated GIFs is useful for a variety of digital marketing reasons. It’s also just some good ol’ fashioned fun!

Photoshop makes it easy. In the video below, I’ll show you how to make GIFs from three different starting points — from standard Photoshop layers, a video imported as frames converted to layers and using a standard video import.

Regardless of how you create them, there are recommendations on the file specifications for GIFs. Although GIFs can be, for example, 100MB in file size, 15 seconds in length and 1280×720 pixels in size, it doesn’t mean that it’s good to do that.

Many GIFS are used in digital marketing materials, such as emails and web banners, so file size matters. Various websites have different GIF recommendations, but the bottom line is that if you can make a quality GIF that’s under a couple of megabytes, as few frames as needed and smaller in image size (unless it’s a banner) … then do it that way so it has more web uses.