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GIFs, technically, are just animated images. But they’re MORE than just animated images. These files offer more than just a visualized animation of our reactions.
GIFs, aside from memes, have been utilized by the current generation as an instrument to express humor in the form of short clips.
However, it’s impossible to please everyone. Some people just HATE GIFs. According to them, GIFs are overrated. It was all cute and funny back then until people used GIFs in everything until the fun turned to annoyance and, well, rage.
In this article, we’ll talk all about GIFs, where they came from, their uses, their pros and cons, and even a few rare facts you may not know about GIFs.
Types of GIFs
Yes, there are various types of GIFs. Learning how to differentiate them will help you determine their proper use. In the following, we’ll be discussing everything on the several types of GIFs you may or may not be aware of.
1. Reaction
Of course, can we forget about this one? Reaction GIFs are the most common use of GIFs. Many GIF search engines have been established to make the use of GIF reactions accessible to every user.
These GIFs allow users to portray their emotions which can’t be visualized and emphasized enough through words.
Reaction GIFs are utilized not only in social media platforms but also in editing videos or films to give off a more lively and fun vibe.
2. Technical
Technical GIFs are commonly displayed as charts, statistics, or graphs – things that are usually boring to look into.
This is why developers decided to use GIFs to turn these lame content into engaging ones. It also makes the data easier to take in because of the visualized and animated graphs.
3. Replay
NFL and NBA maximize the use of GIFs by using high-volume Vines for the replay of highlights of the game and posting it on their social media accounts.
This is how Replay GIFs are helpful. They feature the must-see highlights of a movie, game, or episode of any genre.
4. Perfect-Loop
A loop is never-ending. It’s designed to end in a way that will return to the beginning while making it look like the clip is continuously playing. This is simply how Perfect-Loop GIFs work.
Some looped GIFs display an open-ended story wherein users might take seconds or minutes to figure out that the clip is looped.
This is especially helpful for marketers because this will make potential customers stay longer to watch their product.
What are GIFs used for?
Now that you’re informed of the different types of GIFs, we’ll now move on to its different uses where these types are utilized.
GIFs are not limited to entertainment purposes only. Since it has been lingering on the internet for more than two decades, people have found a way to use it to their advantage.
1. Emphasizing emotions
A simple LOL can’t show off the weight of your emotions, especially when you’re rolling on the floor, dying of laughter.
An animated clip of a man rolling on the floor while laughing will best visualize and express just how funny something is.
If you search on any GIF search engine, you’ll be overwhelmed by how many clips can portray how you’re currently feeling.
2. Marketing
While photos can be enticing, moving pictures are WAY more effective in capturing a person’s attention. Given the ability of GIFs to incorporate a whole palette of colors into their images and clips, through proper designing techniques, you can quickly get people to take an interest in your products.
You can even give a sneak peek of how your products work by showing off a short clip of it, which can make people become invested in your product.
3. Visualization
GIFs have been so advanced that it was also used to summarize graphs and diagrams. Having a visualized explanation allows users to understand technical terms and figures better.
Step-by-step how-to’s can also be made through GIFs that will make it easier for users to follow the exact process that needs to be done.
4. Social media engagement
By using animated reactions as additional responses to comments or inquiries, you can establish a special relationship with your customers and relate to them on a deeper level.
This will help you generate a better social media presence that promotes your products.
Advantages and Disadvantages of GIFs
GIF, or graphic interchange format in its complete terminology, is a digital file format devised in 1987 by CompuServe, an Internet service provider.
It was created to lessen the sizes of images alongside short animations. It’s used on the internet for sending pictures, especially moving ones.
It’s also considerably associated with memes in portraying an emotion or a reaction.
It has many great functions aside from keeping the meme community alive; it enhances product illustrations, renders visual instructions, makes social accounts stand out, and is an avenue for displaying something beautiful.
In today’s age, it’s deemed dying and should be better left in 2021, as most people, especially Gen Zs, say. It’s worth mentioning that GIFs now only hold 28% of all images on the web’s million most famous sites, showing a down of 41% on its preceding two years; this is via data of 2012 and suggests that GIFs could practically disappear from the web by the end of the decade.
Well, we are now in 2022. Should we give up on GIFs? GIFs still have their sparkle of entertaining us and yielding us their incredible benefits, but it last holds drawbacks that can make us think that it’s alright to let them go.
Below are the GIF’s pros and cons to help you in deciding whether GIFs are still your cup of tea or not. Let’s get started.
GIFs Pros
Let’s look at these moving images’ benefits that will convince you that they are still worth grabbing people’s attention on the internet. Spoiler, they hold a lot of excellent pros!
1. High-Quality and Space Saving
The primary feature of GIFs is their ability to produce high-quality outputs without degrading their quality and save space.
GIFs are compressed into super tiny files that make their uploading time faster while maintaining their visual quality.
Moreover, its high quality supports a transparent background that comes in handy when a user wants a more professional look at his website when he is eyeing animation over a varied background.
Lastly, its space-saving feature in faster loading of images online frees up inconvenient moments on the web.
2. Easy to create
If you desire to be the next trending meme face or a professional meme maker yourself above all the roles GIFS can give you; you can freely be so.
These moving images are relatively easy to make, thanks to various websites online that make it possible.
These websites are:
a. Giphy
As of now, Giphy is considered the primary GIF search engine. In addition, the platform decided to establish a GIF maker to allow users to create personalized GIFs.
You can use images or videos derived from the internet or even your own. Take note that this is all for free.
However, observe caution if you’re planning to use your photos to create GIFs in Giphy as there is currently no option for ‘private GIFs .’ Once you create a GIF, it’s automatically set for the public to see.
b. GIFS.com
This tool allows users the same advantages as Giphy.
However, this one doesn’t offer it for free. GIFs.com requires a paid subscription before you can use it.
c. Imgur’s
While this tool doesn’t offer the same advanced features as other GIF-making websites, it allows you to do basic editing. Imgur is mainly used in converting YouTube videos into short GIFs through a quick and easy edit.
There are still a lot of GIF-making websites out there. However, the ones above are the most popular and most used.
If you don’t feel like using these websites, there are apps that you can download, such as the GIPHY CAM or GIF Maker. These apps are accessible on both Android and iOS.
If you’re searching for a more professional vibe, you can use editing software such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP. However, these software products require creative and technical knowledge that might not suit everyone.
Nonetheless, most GIFs don’t require complexity, mainly if it’s only meant to express emotions. Several websites will allow you to create GIFs in just a few clicks.
3. Expressive
GIFs allow the expression of emotions words and images can’t bring out. It can show off any thought you have in your head in a much better, more fantastic, more genuine way. It can project movements and emotions that regular images lack.
It’s the perfect avenue for making tutorial animation, and it will open up a much easier learning experience.
As far as we know, younger audiences can easily be amused with animations, and if you want to teach a child something, leveraging on GIFs can make them willing to pay attention and love learning even more.
4. Make social accounts pop
We all could benefit from minor moments of laughter on the internet. While Vine and Instagram excel in offering video recordings, users can easily incorporate funny GIFs into comment threads on Facebook or their silly profile pictures for Twitter. It’s accessible for any goofy interactions.
It provides life and humor to otherwise lifeless feed on social media platforms or text-based conversations. GIFS are the next best thing since the internet doesn’t have punctuation for sarcasm.
5. GIFs can help you showcase something beautiful and mesmerizing
GIFs are more than humorous reactions, as we have already repeatedly established. Creative people in cinematography can also utilize these animated images.
Cinemagraphs are seemingly still pictures that hold at least one animated feature. For example, a swaying tree in the wind, while the world remains still, or an incredible sunset, with a solemn, moving wave.
6. Stylish
GIFs can definitely make a website more appealing. There are a lot of websites out there that leverage GIFs to design their page and allow them to express who their target audience is. Although this advantage depends on how you will incorporate the GIFs into your website.
The right amount of GIFs and the proper placing of them matters. Too many GIFs might be disturbing to some viewers.
Furthermore, small-sized GIFs support single-bit transparency, wherein you can set a color to be transparent. This feature allows your website a more professional and intricate look with the animations moving over a different background.
7. Compatibility
One of the best features of GIFs is their availability to all kinds of browsers. It allows users to view GIFs on almost all social media platforms and applications.
It breeds convenience in any area one wishes to apply them to, such as sending an endearingly accurate meme to a friend or showcasing a new social media promotion in an online community.
8. No plug-ins
Flash animations need the help of plug-ins to view them. But most GIFs don’t require this since GIFs are recognized by sites as regular images, thus, reducing the hassle of opening up other browsers.
GIFs Cons
Perfect is definitely an idea that doesn’t exist in everything, and GIFs are no exception. Here are the GIFs disadvantages that hopefully will not disappoint you and are immediately ready to let them go and dispatch it.
1. Modification is a struggle
GIFs don’t allow alterations. Once you find the animation has been coded into the file, you’ll be unable to alter or edit it anymore.
In this case, you have to be very careful and practice laying out before carrying out your designs. One mistake, and you’ll need to start all over again.
You don’t want to go through the long editing process again to alter a minor error, don’t you?
2. Limited colors
Given the limited color palette GIFs support, it may result in paler outputs compared to the original file. It occurs because the original image might contain hundreds, or if not thousands, of colors.
GIFs only have a 256 color palette. Therefore, the remaining colors will look paler or even pixelated, resulting in poor-quality images, which contrasts the primary purpose of GIFs: to upload an image without damaging its visual quality.
3. Requires speedy connection
Other formats of GIFs have more considerable bit depths, which doesn’t match the 256 limits of a web page, which might cause the loading time to slow down.
Therefore, once the GIF is coded, they will need a speedy flow of internet connection. While these GIFs are small-sized files, they still require high-speed internet to produce a high-quality output.
If the internet is slow, this might result in poor-quality images and an unpleasant overall view of your page.
4. Dithering
Dithering allows the illusion of having a color depth in images despite a limited color palette. Since GIFs only support a 256 color palette, it will need the help of dithering.
Dithering protects the file from the effects of harsh color contrasts. However, dithering takes up so much space, as it affects the file to be compressed.
The restriction of the file size compression will affect both the uploading time and quality of the image, resulting in poorer results.
5. Customer dissatisfaction
How GIFs will turn out can be affected by a lot of factors. If you plan on using it on your website to make it more engaging to users, its utilization must be executed appropriately.
If not, it might result in an undesirable page that might push them away further instead of enticing more people.
6. Safety and security issues
GIFs can be considered at least 90% safe, as 10% accounts for hacking incidents that are unforeseeable most of the time.
To illustrate an example, In 2019, WhatsApp users were affected with a double-free bug that allows hackers to gain access to user data through GIFs.
7. Other Limitations
Besides the first five disadvantages of GIFS, we’re sad to inform you that there are two more limitations.
Second to the last GIFs’ cons is its capacity to create jerky animation. It happens when a GIF has too few frames in the animation.
The frame rate in these moving images is often low; thus, using too few frames can result in a jumpy, jittery visual content rather than a smooth moving image that most of us would like to see.
Last, if it’s not done well, it can make a website visually unappealing. This last con is the accumulation of all its disadvantages; it opens up an unflattering, inconvenient experience in viewing a GIF that is more or less done with inadequate effort or done so wrongly.
Related post: Can GIFs Have Sound?
GIFs Pros and Cons Table
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| High-Quality and Space Saving | Modification is a struggle |
| Easy to create | Limited colors |
| Expressive | Requires speedy connection |
| Make social accounts pop | Dithering |
| GIFs can help you showcase something beautiful and mesmerizing | Customer dissatisfaction |
| Stylish | Safety and security issues |
| Compatibility | Other Limitations |
| No plug-ins |
GIFs Were Never Meant to be Used as Animated Reactions
The first GIF that came out on the internet was created in response to the call of many tech companies to their problem with sharing quality images with other users.
High-quality photos tend to take bigger spaces. Regarding the speed of modems in the 90s, it’s essentially impossible to retain an image’s quality given its large file size.
The scenario brings tech companies to innovate GIFs, wherein the size of an image is reduced without harming its quality.
However, the current generation completely replaced the real meaning behind the GIFs’ purpose and utilized it for fun.
Did you know, GIFs Almost Went Away for Good!
In 1999, an issue about the non-payment of patents used in making GIFs ignited. It led to the “Burn All GIFs” movement, wherein users burned their GIFs, ending the GIF era.
However, the GIF industry tried its best to push through.
Between 2006 and 2012, GIFs were almost eradicated from the internet. Its usage deliberately dropped to a low number.
In 2013, the use of GIFs resurged and has been in a stable state ever since.
Did you Know, GIFs are BIG Business!
In May 2022, a known GIF website, Giphy, was bought by Facebook for a tremendous amount of $400 million. Before this, they had an estimated annual revenue running for almost $30 million.
It’s one of the pioneer features of social media platforms, as it helps with nearly anything, be it casual posting or serious advertising.
It has helped a million netizens to express themselves in great variety.
GIFs Are Called the Official Language of the Web
It’s due to the GIFs’ capacity to easily send a message that is quick to understand, relatable, and can be shared widely in any application or platform one wishes to.
It’s an excellent avenue for capturing a specific movement to illustrate emotion and spark curiosity that makes people amused and wonder.
When we’re sharing a GIF, we also share the emotional response that makes way for beautiful non-verbal communication.
Above all else, it’s an art and a delicate form of expression.
Final Thoughts
And there you have it – a vibrant discussion about GIFs pros and cons. Overall I think GIFs are worth saving and sticking to.
We cannot just leave it behind in the last year, as it holds a lot of great use, and it shapes the internet into a funnier, livelier space to be in.
Their disadvantages may turn off certain people, but we can only expect so much about these animated images.
A great way to overcome these disadvantages may lie in one’s capacity to use GIFs to their fullest potential, in addition to maximizing one’s skill to create outstanding moving images that take into consideration its weak points.
GIFs have proven their use over the years, but there are factors that still need improvement. In the end, it still all comes down to your preferences.
Nevertheless, no amount of hate or annoyance can deny that GIFs make people a little bit more expressive and this world a little bit more lively.
