Regardless of how you pronounce it, there’s no denying that the GIF has taken a graceful tumble from Tumblr into the rest of our digital lives. You can use GIFs to share expressive reactions in emails, texts, and even work messages. And now, there are a ton of new apps to help you make them.
From insta-celebrity F*ck Jerry to our favourite hipster filter-makers at VSCO Cam, it seems that nearly everyone wants to get into this moving-picture game.
“But how many GIF apps does one really need?” you ask. We’ll let you be the judge. After all, only you truly know how demanding your GIF-creation needs are. But to make things easier, here’s our roster of the top seven GIF-making apps. Read on to figure out which ones make sense for your home screen.
1. GIPHY Cam
It makes sense that GIPHY Cam would snag the top spot on our list. GIPHY has been the best at bringing “all the GIFs” to the internet since its inception in 2013. Its latest iOS app for actually making gifs, Giphy Cam, is evidence that its team just gets it.
GIPHY's super-clean and straightforward user flow lets you hold the shutter to record a long GIF (something DSCO Cam also adopted) or tap for a looping GIF. But what really wins it for GIPHY Cam is its superb selection of filters and effects. From adding a “VHS” grainy blur to superimposed cats, tears, and tacos, this app is easy to use, endlessly entertaining, and just all-around fun.
Photo: Courtesy GIPHY.
2. DSCO Cam
Leave it to the team that brought you VSCO Cam to make GIFs feel less like deep internet humour and more, well, “cool.” This is the app for the more refined GIF-maker, if you will.
You can hold your finger on the shutter for a longer GIF, or just tap for a quick, moving loop. There’s a slick left swipe that takes you through signature VSCO filters, such as M5, A6, and B1, plus a new, MTV rainbow-hued overlay. Another subtle, two-finger swipe-down gesture will take you to your settings. Once you’re satisfied with your GIF, tapping “publish to VSCO” will share your creation to the VSCO community, automatically save it to your camera roll, and then offer up other standard Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram shares. It's available on iOS only, for now.
Photo: Courtesy VSCO Cam.
3. Giffage
When something is co-founded by funny guy “F*CK Jerry,” the humour bar is set pretty high. Giffage gives that bar a high five; it’s fun “AF,” as they say.
The iOS app uses the GIPHY library as its GIF source and includes all of GIPHY's awesome categorisations — like a dedicated corgi category, for example. Swiping down gives you a menu of search options, organised by categories, trending, and things you’ve “loved,” and swiping left will give you an almost-endless horizontal feed of moving images. The coolest feature is the ability to invent your own category and have access to your creations (along with any other GIFs in the app) right from your keyboard. Who needs the eye-roll emoji when you can just send a GIF of your very own eyeballs?
Photo: Courtesy Giffage.
4. GifX
If GifX were a senior in a high school full of other GIF-making apps, its yearbook superlative might be “most likely to follow Phish around.” That is to say: GifX is undoubtedly the trippiest of all the GIF-making apps out there — and the quickest way to jazz up your static camera roll.
Either take a picture or choose one from your iPhone’s photo library. Then, add a layer of screen-saver-esque movements on top. You can control the opacity of the image's top layer, making the effects more or less obvious. Then, you can save your trippy little snippet as a video or a GIF.
Photo: Courtesy Gifx.
5. Ultra Text
For more textually driven individuals, Ultra Text turns any written message into a brightly coloured animated one — and it's compatible with Facebook Messenger to boot. It’s almost as if YO! (Remember that? Yeah, you do) let you say something more than...well, you know.
The Ultra Text iOS and Android apps offer a ton of fonts, colours, and stickers that create a dramatic texting GIF. This is particularly useful for attention grabbing when a good old-fashioned text goes unanswered.
Photo: Courtesy Ultra Text.
6. Phhhoto
An oldie (relatively speaking, since it launched almost a year and a half ago), but a goodie, Phhhoto is a veritable social network, with over a million registered users and over 10 million little, looping pieces of content on its platform. Its discovery tab, called “WOW,” showcases some pretty mind-boggling looping videos, and it’s always fun to check in and see the app's latest filters, which it updates frequently to correspond with holidays, seasons, and pop culture trends. Phhhoto is available for iOS and Android.
Photo: Courtesy Phhhoto.
7. Boomerang
While technically not a “GIF” maker (a GIF is, after all, just a file type), this Instagram app takes a bunch of photos at once and, it explains, "stitches them together to make a video" that loops. Leaner than most traditional GIF apps, Boomerang is simple and sleek, offering easy shares to Facebook and Instagram (duh), as well as options to save to your camera roll.
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