Best GIF making software, preferably free...
 

I was wanting to know if anyone had any reccomendations as Google has been so far unhelpful. I was also wanting to know if it is possible to create GIFs from single JPGs. Thank you in advance for any help you guys may give.

Are you talking animated gifs? You'd need something like Jasc Animation Shop.

Adobe Photoshop imageready

I use Imageready myself, but if you're new to the whole thing, Animation Shop is much more intuitive and has a friendlier learning curve. Among other things, it has a wizard whick lets you pick out a series of individual files (like jpegs), set the rotation speed and size, and export an animated gif.

Don't know if Animation Shop is available for download individually, but it's bundled with the trial version of Paint Shop Pro.

imageready is also really blowy at image compression; your gifs will be 90 megs in size by the time you're done. Ask rog whatever he uses when he finishes tooling around the nation.

Oh, you can compress files just fine if you know where to look, but Imageready is so much more than a gif animation program that the functions you want kinda disappear in the crowd.

YOU GOT SERVED