My Favorite GIF App Features: Giphy Web Suite (GIF Maker, Slideshow, GIF Caption, GIF Editor)
If you choose to Create an animated GIF from the Giphy site, you will be presented with four similar creation tools, each serving a distinct GIF-making scenario.
GIF Maker
Gif Maker is a general purpose GIF creator allowing you to start with either your own video files (up to 100MB), or the URL of a video from many popular video sites (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, and Vine).
My favorite feature of Giphy’s GIF Maker is a technique I rarely employ when creating animated GIFs — adding captions. With a choice of three fonts styled properly for a meme, entering centered text (the only typographic alignment allowed) in the text field will give you immediate results on your looping GIF in-progress above.
You can control the position and size of the text by dragging the text box or the corner, respectively. Delete captions just as easily with the close button that appears as you hover over the text. Tools like Imgflip offer equally functional text controls, but the general efficiency of Giphy’s caption tool, and the smoothness of transitions delivers an overall GIF-creating UI that has few equals online.
Slideshow
Slideshow is a tool to create an animated GIF from still images and other animated GIFs.
My favorite feature about this tool, like the GIF Maker tool, has everything to do with the interface. Check out these animated icons that accompany FASTER and SLOWER labels…
GIF Caption
GIF Caption is a tool for adding captions to still images and animated GIFs.
My favorite feature of the GIF Caption tool is that it offers animated text options. Once you’ve chose one of four animation styles, you can manipulate the text on-screen as you would a static piece of text. This, in effect, is editing video on top of video. As an animator, the implications for how this works, and how quickly it works, are extraordinary.
It’s also worth mentioning that all of the stickers in the Sticker Book (designed by @animatedtext) are animated. It can get pretty crazy pretty fast.
GIF Editor
GIF Editor is a fun, and simple way to edit existing GIFs by adding text, effects, and animated stickers.
My favorite feature about the GIF Editor is the options for how effects behave on your GIF-in-progress.
Though many photo and video manipulation tools apply effects globally across the image, I found it refreshing and potentially useful that Giphy offers different ways to apply effects.
And, again, Giphy one-ups the competition with delightful details in the UI.
The Full Suite
The pace of Giphy’s GIF-creation tool output is dizzying. I suppose they are making good use of their recent round of funding. This suite of free tools, combined with their standalone apps, and the many ways developers are tapping into Giphy’s growing trove of GIFs using their API, all make a compelling argument that the company is well on their way to becoming synonymous with the format itself, that is, if they aren’t already.
