Quick Crop and Rotate GIF with GIMP Image Manipulation

GIF means graphic interchange format. One of the first and fundamental digital storage methods for pictures on computers and the internet.

Alphabet Soup

What sets GIFs apart from PNG, JPG, JPEG, BMP, RAW and the rest is that GIFs can do a motion picture effect. A single GIF image can be many slightly different images that cycle through with the illusion of movement.

Open GIMP Open GIF Select Area

Open your GIMP program and menu File->Open navigate to and open the input .gif file. Select the area you want in the final image.

Layers

We want to crop and rotate the entire animated GIF which is actually many frames. GIMP shows these frames as Layers in the lower right of the screen.

GIMP lets us work on single frames or on the whole image. So we see the same commands repeated in our pull down menus.

Image Menu

Menu Image->Crop to Selection. Just like PhotoShop the dashed line shows the affected area.

Transform

Menu Image->Transform->Rotate and select the angle and direction. The menus offer many more graphics tools.

Export As..

We can export an alphabet soup of wonderful formats.

By Extension

Extension is the little ending we put on files. We are working on a .gif graphics interchange format picture but we can export it as a jpeg, for example. This time we want to make sure we get a GIF so we just name our final image something.gif and it will be automatic.

GIF Options

This part is important. Tick the As animation box, select a Delay between frames, tick the two bottom box to apply delay to whole GIF. We can slow down or speed up.

Ta-Da

Success!