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How To Make a GIF

The Digital Public Library of America is an organization that aims to gather the resources and archives of American libraries and museums to make them freely available on the internet.  The DPLA recently held two workshops about making GIFs, short web animations, with tools freely available on the web as well as professional image editing software.  The webinars aim to encourage use of public domain and archival images and video in the creation of GIFs.

GIF-Making 101

GIF-Making 101 introduced participants to techniques and methods for making GIFs through freely available web services.  These services take a short video or series of photos and turn them into an animation ready to be embedded on the web.  Links and resources can be found on the workshop page.

Advanced GIF-Making Techniques

The workshop for advanced techniques focused on methods for creating GIFs using Adobe Photoshop, the industry standard in image editing, and GIMP, an open source alternative.  While these methods may not be as fast as the free online services demonstrated in the GIF-Making 101 workshop, they allow for much more creative freedom and a more efficient workflow for complex projects.  Links and resources, including example files, can be found on the workshop page.

The Consumerist Gaze

Lisa Daily
Spring 2017

The Consumerist Gaze was a course taught by Prof. Lisa Daily in the Spring 2017 term that focused on how commodity images play a role in the process of production and consumption. This course was particularly focused on exploring the notion of “the gaze” from different theoretical and cultural stances with regard to global capitalism. The course structure required students to go through different kinds of textual materials, videos, movies, case studies, and images, an approach that  enables students to take a reflective approach while analyzing these resources. As part of the weekly assignments, students were required to write blog posts based on their critical evaluation of the readings and other cultural materials. Such blogging assignments can act as pre-writing activities for longer writing assignments, and have the additional benefits of facilitating close reading, creating transparency and dialogue between students, and encouraging the development of learning communities.

Professor Daily and her students used NYU’s Web Publishing platform to share the readings, blog entries, ethnographic studies and final projects. Students also created an archive of images that they had collected throughout the semester. The images were based on the theme of the role of the consumer’s gaze in commodity markets and capitalist economies. To execute these tasks effectively, some of the plugins that were used while creating the course site were NextGEN Gallery by Photocrati, User-Submitted Posts, Image Wall, Doc Embedder, Attachment Importer, etc. The use of different kinds of technological resources helped the students and instructor share their work and engage in meaningful class discussions.

How to Resize Images

If you have a large image file, it might make sense to make it smaller. (And it is never a good idea, by the way, of making a small image file larger!) Web Publishing, for instance, has a file size maximum of 10GB. Here are instructions for optimizing your images…

Windows

  1. Open image in Microsoft Paint (free and pre-installed on your PC)
  2. File > Image Properties (to see current file size and dimensions)
  3. Click Resize > adjust photo’s pixels or percentage (always resize your images proportionally)
  4. Click OK > Save

(To crop the image, use the selector tool and click “Crop” on the menu.)

Mac

  1. Open image in Preview (free and pre-installed on your Mac)
  2. Tools > Adjust Size (to see current size and dimensions)
  3. Resize your image’s width, height, or resolution (always scale your images proportionally  to avoid distortions)
  4. Click Enter > Save

(To crop the image, use a selection tool and click “Crop” under the Tools menu.)

We’ve compiled some resources for images, icons, and graphics that are free and available for purchase.