There are lots of programs out there that can be used to make animated gifs, with varying degrees of complexity. Photoshop and Gimp are a bit beyond me, so I use something a little less complicated.
I use a program called MovieToAGIF (just google it). It doesn't have much in the way of features; you simply click file to load your source video, move a slider and select your start and finish. Export to gif and that's basically it (for relatively high res video I recommend using the 50% option when exporting).
It isn't very precise; the larger the source video is, the harder it is to fine tune your creation. So I generally make the gif slightly bigger than required, and then edit it afterwards. I use a free image editor called Photoscape for this; it allows you to simply drag and drop an animated gif, and it will show you the individual frames. You can delete unwanted frames, change the timing and crop / resize.
That's basically it. Not very mystical.
Nice post. I've been using a program called "Free Video to GIF converter" for mine, although I've also been using Windows Movie Maker in order to get the clips exactly the right length before converting them. And then I've also used Photoshop to make the perfect loop ones as well. Attached a screenshot of the video converter for anyone interested.
That's a nice little program clockwork, I can see that being very useful.