GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) files are small slideshows that cycle through the frames showing one photo after another.
The GIF maker in this program goes through all your photos, finding all those people who have been identified, then it constructs GIFs assigning to a frame one photo .The GIF for an individual, such as “Rick Lyman” is stored in a file “Rick Lyman.gif”. For an examples, go to https://www.uhsclassof65.org/ or https://www.uhsclassof65.org/Clippings/Little-Gifs/
First build an index. In the File Folder dialog box, choose the root of all you photo files. This analyzes all the files and folders under the foot folder.
Now select which people to make GIFs for. If a single person’s name is selected, then only one GIF will be made. If a keyword has been applied to a number of photos, then GIFs will be made for all the people who were in those photos. For instance, if all the senior class mugshots have “Senior Class” keyword, the selecting “Senior Class” from the drop down list will cause GIFs to made of all people who were in the senior class.
The GIFs are square. The GIF size is the number of pixels on a side for the resulting GIFs. The Frame Speed is the number of seconds that each frame will display. A small random perturbation is applied so that a matrix of GIFs will blink randomly. See an example at https://www.uhsclassof65.org/Clippings/Little-Gifs/
As an added filter, the minimum number of days between frame photos can be selected. For instance, if you wanted only one frame of the GIF from all the photos that were taken of that person on a day, select 2 days. The “Date Taken” of each frame will be at least 2 days apart.
After selecting the keyword, GIF size, and GIF speed parameters, push the Make GIFS button to start the process. The output GIFs are placed in a folder underneath the root folder with the same name as the root folder with “-gifs_1” appended to the name. On each run of the program, it detects whether any of the ‘-gif’ folders exist and makes a new fresh empty folder. For instance a second run would have the name “-gifs_2” appended to the root folder name. This way, there is never a chance of writing over the source photos or previous generated GIFs