In dire need of assistence [GIF animation]

[Sarevok]

I make simple stop motion animation films. Unfortunately I also suck at graphics software. So the simple process of turning a series of bitmaps into a GIF animation is a very ardous process for me. I have to manually open every single bitmap, copy it to clipboard, paste it into Microsoft GIF animator and then save it. A 5 sec animation might take hours to do. This is repetive, tiring and unnecessary. A computer program that accepts all bitmaps in a folder and saves them in a GIF could do it in an instant. Is there such a free program out there ?

[Thanas]

Bounty as I recall is the GIF expert on this board, but from my limited experience GIMP does the job quite well, as does the free and very easy trial version of Easy GIF animator.