Gifs: moving pictures without sound are increasingly seen on social media. It is not for nothing that GIFs are extremely popular and the largest GIF platform in the world, Giphy, is integrated in, for example, Twitter and WhatsApp. However, you can also easily make a gif yourself.
There are several ways in which you can put together a gif. Is your source material a video or a number of photos? Or is it one photo you want to write something crazy on that keeps flickering? So it depends on your source material which method you choose. For example, you can make a gif of a few still images in PhotoShop, but that is much easier online on a free website.
Make jokes
A gif (Graphics Interchange Format) file, which is actually an image with .gif at the end. That means there are several layers that pass in sequence until it reaches the end and starts again at the first image. That is, if you choose to let the gif 'loop', because it is also possible that you let it freeze after playing it once. You also have a choice of how long your gif should last and even how long each image should be shown. For example, think of a prank gif, where your victim expects to look at a still image of kittens, until an image of the Exorcist suddenly flashes by very briefly.
You don't have to download a separate software program to make a gif, because you can even make your own gif within Giphy. Suppose you don't have a video, but a few separate images that you want to play one after the other. This is how you go about making it a gif:
- Go to www.giphy.com
- Click Create at the top right
- Choose Choose Photo or GIF
- From your computer, choose the files you want to use
- After these have been uploaded, you will see that Giphy has already made a slideshow of it.
- You can then choose how long your poison should last.
- Go to 'Continue to decorate' to add funny letters to it.
- Click through and you will see your gif before you upload it and make it available via Giphy. You can still add tags to it, but please note, this will make it easier for others to find.
- Once it has been posted, you can right click on it to save it, you will see that it has a .gif extension.
- Done, you've made your gif.
Of course, you may want to have a little more control over how your gif looks and you may not want to put it online in that world-famous database at all. You can then choose to use another website. A website that offers many possibilities is Ezgif, where you can for example give your gif different dimensions or stop the loop after x number of times.
You can also lower the quality of the gif via Ezgif, making the file size somewhat smaller. We recommend that you keep an eye on whether your gif is not too large. The duration of the gif in particular influences the file size enormously, but the format also plays a role in this. After all, it's the most fun when a gif is loaded quickly, so that the joke comes in at exactly the right time.
