The GIF image format, or Graphics Interchange Format born 25 years ago, in 1987, is still today a type of image that is very popular and fun to see, which allows you to create animated images of various types, such as short clips of video that repeat themselves looped. GIFs are capable of delivering a concise message in an instant, without the need to press a 'Play' button as for videos.
GIFs are, in essence, perfect for expressing a feeling and attracting attention in a flash.
GIFs, which for some time have been abused and considered annoying, have come back in fashion in recent years, especially with the spread of Cinemagraph GIFs, those where everything remains fixed, except for a part and the fact that you can publish your favorite GIFs on the own Tumblr or Google+ blog (Facebook does not support GIFs).
So popular are the searches for GIF images that some animated image search engines have been born and even Google Images, after a recent update, allows you to find only the animated GIF images, in order to save or use them in your own projects.
A nice search engine dedicated to animated GIF images is called Giphy .
This search engine allows you to find only GIF images, always animated.
You can then write the name of a famous actor or a character or any action to find all the animated images.
The peculiarity of Giphy is that on the site it is possible to see the animation by moving the mouse over the image, without necessarily having to open it on a separate page.
The home page shows a search bar at the top with many boxes that refer to the most popular searches at the moment.
None of the images move until you move the cursor over them.
GIFs can also be downloaded and shared with other users.
Giphy, however, is a rather limited search engine in the results so it is good news that the main site to search on the internet, Google, now has a special filter to find only animated images in Google Images .
READ ALSO: Tricks and functions of the new Google Image Search
Then open Google Images, go to search tools, click on Any type and then on Animate to have as a result only the GIF images which is the format of the moving images.
The thumbnails are not moving and you need to open the image in its original format on another page to see it move.
Another site full of GIFs to view and download is Tumblr, the Yahoo blog platform that is increasingly used to share animated themed images.
To view and download the best GIFs around there are several collections on other websites like
- Twistedsifter, with special GIF images to express different moods and reactions, ReactionGifs, 4gifs.
In other articles I remember that the best ways to report are reported:
- Turn a video into a GIF to save as a looped animated image
- Create animated GIF images composed of photos, videos and webcam shots
- Create GIF Cinemagraph (still video where only part of it goes on) with Microsoft Cliplets
