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!
If anyone deserves having her picture shared 16 times in this GIF, it’s definitely Giulia! Having just assembled a 24 layer GIF with two separate moving images, I can only imagine how long this must have taken you, and how many great pictures that didn’t make it into the final piece.
This is a great GIFmas card, and I’m honored that I made it into the final road trip reflection. It was great to finally meet one of my blogging idols from way back in the day (2003-2004 seems so ancient now), but more importantly, it was great to meet a friend and solidify the digital connection over a cup of coffee and some great stories.