Animated / looping images inside Prezi

Prezi, thankfully, still supports animations, but not as we now know and love them. With one simple step, however, you can insert animated gifs and take other short movies and insert them into your Prezi presentation to liven them up.

Although Prezi does not support animated gifs (yet, hint, hint) you can easily convert these to Flash swf format files which will loop indefinitely in a Prezi.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, they dropped support for adding SWF into the latest Prezi Classic directly, so you might want to divert to this page: https://www.frsimon.uk/animations-using-swf-inside-latest-prezi-classic/ to see the latest update of this saga.

Here is how you do it.

1. Find your animated gif through Google Images
2. Enter a search term and then select “Search Tools” and under “Type” select “Animated”
3. This will limit the search to images that are moving. Download that image (Right-Click / Save As…)
4. Visit the excellent Convertio online converter, drag and drop the downloaded file onto the page and select as output “Video/SWF”
5. Add as many files as you like and then convert them. There is a daily limit, but I can’t imagine you would exceed this for this purpose.
6. Now in Prezi, you can drag and drop the new SWF file, or Insert it as a File. You can also insert it as a Background image, which is particularly good as an opener.
7. I would use it sparingly, especially as some animated gifts move very fast, but a gentle animation like the one above, or a subtle illustration can be effective.
8. Beyond that, you can convert a (very) short and small movie from your video editing package into an swf. You can do this directly in some packages (NCH VideoPad) or export it from iMovies / Windows Movie Maker and convert it via Convertio. This could be, I imagine, a moving graph, or a quick clip.

Have fun.