Hypnotically looping GIFs are, nowadays, one of the best ways to share an emotion online — whether it's congratulations, a punch line, or utter confusion. GIPHY makes finding and sharing the perfect GIF easy, but until now, creating your own GIFs has been a delicate and complicated art. Today, however, GIPHY has launched a new app that lets you create and star in your own looping videos.
With GIPHY CAM, you just choose a filter or an animated background and tap the on-screen shutter button to record. Then, you're free to save your new GIF for later or share it with friends in an email, message, or on social media.
"You’re not looking for a GIF so you can watch it over and over for 20 minutes; you’re trying to communicate with someone," GIPHY COO Adam Leibsohn told Refinery29. "GIFs are this sort of evolving shorthand for self-expression, by virtue of this mobile and social world we live in."
Using the app, you can record in two ways: either by holding the shutter down for a loop, or by tapping the shutter to shoot five burst-mode shots that will then play as a stop-animation-style loop.
You can use the free iOS app to create GIFs like this:
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Or this:
Or this one that my cat refused to turn around for:
It should be noted that when you save these to your phone's camera roll, they will appear as static images (come on, Apple — time to support GIFs), but once you send them elsewhere, the images will reveal their true animation.
Your Slack channel may have just gotten a lot weirder.