Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve definitely come across gifs in your daily social media experience. Short for graphics interchange format, a gif is an image format that can be both static and animated. Because a plain old image just won’t cut it these days, gifs allow you to convey real-time emotion with simple cut and paste.
Now Giphy, the site that hosts an exhaustive collection of animated gifs, has created a new app that lets you create and share original gifs. Giphy Cam allows users to record a short gif (maximum length is five seconds) that’s shareable via text, email and across social channels.
I tested out the fun app and it’s super easy to record your own gif, throw on fun filters and frames, and send it to friends. I would rate it 4.5 out of 5 for ease of use and share ability. I shaved a half point off because it doesn’t allow you to add text to your gifs. Giphy Cam is available on iOS with the Android version on the way. Happy Gipphing!
Fun fact: Although gi is commonly pronounced with a hard ‘g’ as in ‘go”, the creator of the gif file format insists it should be pronounced with a soft “g” sound like “JIF.” That may be a losing battle.