Sure, the Oxford American Dictionary made the verb “to GIF” a word of the year, but they fell short– it should be noun, adjective, adverb, maybe even present past participle of the year, too.

Yes, it’s the peak of ds106 GIFfest.

And I did not even get close to sending out real holiday cards this year. So here is my GIFfy GIF greeting I GIFfed as a way to reflect on the travels an connections in 2012.

See it in almost full sized animated glory (2.5 Mb)

This monster GIF includes 100 photos I chose from my flickr stream, with special people and places from 2012 (and if somewhere I likely left you put, sorry!). And I count this for the ds106 GIffest GIFMas Card.

It actually works great as a repeating recycling of 2012. In perpetuity.

I managed to just about cover North America with people and places I got to see this year, and even this is just a smal snapshot of the year. Just paging through the archives (can you do this on those other shabby photo sharing sites?) was a neat way to scroll through time and distance.

It was pushing the limits of Photoshop to process the full sized GIF, and the colors are a bit off with the 128color palette (the source PSD is 23 Mb). It took a bit of hand processing to make them sequentially appear. I had fun doing it, which to me, is my own Starfleet Prime Directive.

As the year of 2012 rolls to a close, its last month full of numerical palindromes the world did not end in a Mayan prophecy (but our own crazed society gave it a good effort), let’s do it again!

A lucky year awaits. See you there.

LATERS: I got the silly idea to send a personal email note to the people in the photos here. I now have a list of 55 people to contact, some of them pictured 3,4,5 times, one special one 16 times!

My menorah is put away, but it seems such a nice symbol to GIF, maybe have to slip it in under Ben Rimes’ GIFmas Card assignment (the first rule of ds106 I tell my students is to change up and break the rules of an assignment, if it makes for good art).

Do you need the whole story? I would think the Macabees would dig some GIF miracles.

This started with mp photo from night 7 (I forgot to get one on the last night)

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by cogdogblog

But that’s no problem, I was able to magic brush in a copy of one of the middle candles to fill the gap. i also managed to lose two flames by… well I think I forgot to paste. So I copied an isolated flame, and flipped it horizontal to make it looks little different

This baby weighs in at only 48k! That’s because I have isolated single flames to a layer, rather than replicating the entire scene. I copied each flame to its own layer, and then painted in black the space behind for the background. I use the animation palette window menu to convert the Layers to Frames.

(click to see full size)

Then it was a matter of turning on layers sequentially for the sequence, and adding some longer time for the first and last frame.

Doing the GUFs in layers, and using it to only place things that change is the MAGIC to making GIFs you can really generate a lot of movement and not make it bloat up to me a 2 Mb file.

If I was going to notch it up a level. I might make duplicates of the flames and flip them, so I could make them flicker across frames.

GIFfing it up for Channukah! or is it Hannukah? or is it ??