The instructions in this guide require the use of Ezgif[ezgif.com], a free online GIF manipulation utility.

Guide thumbnail created by Regal.

Once you've chosen an image that you'd like to use as a guide thumbnail, you will first want to ensure that it has the correct proportions. Steam requires guide thumbnails to have a square aspect ratio, (i.e. both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the image must be the same value) which can be attained for most transparent GIFs by expanding the area around the image. Select the Crop tab in Easygif, (linked in the above section) upload your image, and press the Extend Canvas Size button. This should double the size of your image in both dimensions while keeping its content centered.



To crop out a square area corresponding to the original size of your image, enter the following values into the Left, Top, Width, and Height fields that appear below the preview frame and press the Crop button:

Steam only supports guide thumbnails with file sizes below 2 MB, so it may be necessary to resize your thumbnail to ensure compliance with that limit. To accomplish this, go to the Resize tab on Ezgif and define smaller dimensions (must still be in a square aspect ratio) for your image:





256x256 is a sufficient resolution in nearly all cases, and will still look good in most places where your guide might be displayed. If this is somehow not enough, or you'd like your guide thumbnail to be a higher resolution, you can also make use of the tools available in the Optimize tab, including color reduction and lossy compression:



Note that the latter may introduce artifacting to your thumbnail GIF, and is recommended only as an option of last resort.

If you've tried to upload your GIF as a guide thumbnail before this section, you'll likely notice that it has an unfortunate black background:

This is a result of a small bit of post-processing designed to, for whatever reason, change the background color defined for the image, resulting in a solid color displaying instead. Luckily, we can break this step by messing with the GIF format a little. Using a hex editor, (hexedit[hexed.it] will suffice if you don't have one installed) replace the last byte of the GIF file with the hexadecimal value 2C like so:

This replaces the file termination indicator with an additional image descriptor, creating an 'endless' GIF that breaks the backend process responsible for adding the background, yet will still render correctly in most web browsers despite the nonstandard format.

Once you have completed all of the previous sections, create a guide viewable only from your Steam profile featuring your GIF by following this link:

✨ http://test1.login.steam.hlxgame.cc/sharedfiles/editguide/?appid=753 ✨

Having trouble finding a transparent GIF that matches your profile aesthetic? Here are a few image galleries to start your search with:

• https://www.are.na/butter-gutz/gif-a_rpb50duog - Assorted transparent GIFs
  
• https://www.are.na/butter-gutz/yummy-q5befzgri1k - Rotating food (this will make you hungry)
  
• https://www.are.na/butter-gutz/lil-tiny-pixels-gifs - Small, retro-styled animations
  
• https://gifcities.org - Repository of Geocities gifs from the Internet Archive
  
• https://giphy.com/search/giphy-stickers - Giphy sticker search