Although it's true no one would put an actual gif animation into a game, they are far from useless. One of the best ways to study animations is to look at animated gifs because they show a single motion repeated infinitely - you can immediately tell if this is a movement you want your own sprite to be able to execute, you can watch it cycle repeatedly to develop a good sense of the motion, you can slow it down to see it in more detail, and you can advance it one frame at a time to see how many are necessary and what is going on in each one. Static sprite sheets are better or in-game uses but they're damn hard to study.

Also, the animated format is the most convenient way to display a single completed animation to other team members, in forums like this one, and on a project website, unless you want to do that with flash, which may cause problems for any viewers who have noscript or don't have the flash plugin installed.

looking at an animation is more up to the application itself rather than the gif format, (which only legacy feature still useful is previewing on the web).

gimps animation tools are probably more the reason rather than gif.

one tool I used back in the days with animation and sprites especially back in the days was pro-motion, is it still being used for portable sprite works today?



and to the threadopener, what kind of sprite-sizes are we talking about?