Not so long ago, we showed you how to use Photoshop to turn a Youtube video into an animated GIF. Here’s how to do it without Photoshop or GIMP in only a few short moments, using easy online-only services.

There are several online app-only methods for turning YouTube into animated GIFs, but we’ll focus today on a service that doesn’t require a signup or login to make it as easy as possible. If you have your own favorite services for converting YouTube videos, don’t forget to tell us about them in the comments.

Downloading YouTube Videos

We’ll start by picking an appropriate Youtube video, in this case the classic pilot episode for Adventure Time. The dance scene should make a nice animated GIF, so we’ll use that for our “No Photoshop” method. If you’d prefer to try the Photoshop animation method, check it out here.

Copy the URL of your YouTube video from the address bar of your browser.

KeepVid.com is a simple service for downloading YouTube videos. Simply paste the URL into the text bar as shown above and click “Download.”

• KeepVid.com: Download and save YouTube Videos

Depending on your browser, you may have several warnings about running the applet on KeepVid. You’ll have to allow all of them in order to download the video.

You’ll also see your browser’s version of this security warning. Although KeepVid tells you to select “Always trust content” use your own best judgement when doing this.

After a few moments, you can download the video in multiple formats. FLV will work best for our purposes.

Converting Videos To GIF (The Easy Way)

BenderConverter is a very simple and decent service that, among many other conversions, will create GIF animations from any video you upload. There are others, including GIFsoup, although its frontpage can potentially be NSFW and it requires a signup to use. We’ll continue on using Benderconverter, since it does not require a signup to make a GIF.

• BenderConverter.com: Create GIFs from Uploads
• GIFSoup (Requires Signup)

Select GIF animation from the radial selections and browse for your freshly downloaded YouTube video. Click “Convert” to proceed to the next step.

The next step is simply waiting!

Once your video is uploaded, you can play a preview to pick a start and end time for your animated GIF.

For our example, we input a start of 0 min 39 sec and an end time of 0 min 48 seconds.

In addition to this, we also select “Reverse effect,” which reverses your video onto itself, making the start and end times more seamless. It also increases the size of your video, so be careful! Once you have your settings the way you want them, click one of the three sizes for GIFs and click “Watch & Download.”

Once you pick one, you’ll be treated to more waiting.

And, behold, your GIF is ready for download, in small avatar size.

BenderConverter sadly watermarks the larger sizes, although if you have Photoshop or the GIMP animation package, you can crop these out without trouble. But since this article is about creating GIFs without using Photoshop, we’ll ignore that step.

Here’s our final product! Do you know some alternate (or better) Video to GIF services? Feel free to share them with us in the comments.