So everything looks good, but how can we add more then one frame to the image file. Most of the image formats (like .bmp, .jpg, .psd) support only one static image. There are couple of things you can do. First of all you can use standard called GIF 98A(or animated gif). Most of animated doll you see on the net are created this way, but there is another well-known method. You can use regular flash animation (.swf file). It all just depends what are you familiar with. If you are new to this, I would recomend to start from GIF. This is what we are going to discuss in this article.

GIF - is not for free. There should be no application out there (you can try to find one) that can provide you gif (and of course animated gif) for free. That by the way is also one of the reasons why The Doll Palace doll maker can not crerate gif files. If you want to read more about this, I would recommend you this history of GIF.

How can we start if we do not have money for it? Let's use trial versions for now, and probably we will get registered version later. So let's go www.download.com and type "animated gif" in search field and click "Go" (I will assume you are running Windows). Now we can download and install "Animagic GIF Animator". I picked this file because it is pretty small (for all our modem users) and looks like a pretty good thing for beginners.

I will not be able to describe all the installation steps, but this is what you should be able to see when you start it. Go to "File" -> "Open..." and and select alligator.gif and click "Open". You have just selected one file, but if you will look at the frame list window you will see that 3 frames were loaded. The image that we just opened has three frames inside. You can select and view each frame by clicking on it in the frame list window. Are you ready, let's do the magic now, click play button here you go, the animation is playing and you see aligator opening his eyes and moving his tail.

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