Programmatically generate video or animated GIF in Python?

I'd recommend not using images2gif from visvis because it has problems with PIL/Pillow and is not actively maintained (I should know, because I am the author).

Instead, please use imageio, which was developed to solve this problem and more, and is intended to stay.

Quick and dirty solution:

import imageio
images = []
for filename in filenames:
    images.append(imageio.imread(filename))
imageio.mimsave('/path/to/movie.gif', images)

For longer movies, use the streaming approach:

import imageio
with imageio.get_writer('/path/to/movie.gif', mode='I') as writer:
    for filename in filenames:
        image = imageio.imread(filename)
        writer.append_data(image)

Here's how you do it using only PIL (install with: pip install Pillow):

import glob
from PIL import Image

# filepaths
fp_in = "/path/to/image_*.png"
fp_out = "/path/to/image.gif"

# https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/handbook/image-file-formats.html#gif
imgs = (Image.open(f) for f in sorted(glob.glob(fp_in)))
img = next(imgs)  # extract first image from iterator
img.save(fp=fp_out, format='GIF', append_images=imgs,
         save_all=True, duration=200, loop=0)

See docs: https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/handbook/image-file-formats.html#gif

Well, now I'm using ImageMagick. I save my frames as PNG files and then invoke ImageMagick's convert.exe from Python to create an animated GIF. The nice thing about this approach is I can specify a frame duration for each frame individually. Unfortunately this depends on ImageMagick being installed on the machine. They have a Python wrapper but it looks pretty crappy and unsupported. Still open to other suggestions.