Google+ has a nifty feature—known as ‘auto awesome’—where it detects runs of photos which may be compiled together into short animations, automatically creating these animations for you.

If uploading all your images to Google+ to create a few animations seems a little excessive, you can create your own using ImageMagick:

convert -resize 1024x1024 -delay 20 *.JPG output.gif

Update: ffmpeg can do the pretty much the same thing for movies which are a far more efficient format but require a little more work to embed:

ffmpeg -r 5 -pattern_type glob -i '*.JPG' -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4