GIFFFFR

Animated GIFs have become the social language of the internet, used across Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, emails, and even text messages. While everyone uses them, it's hard for people to make their own — the current tools and applications out there are complicated, slow, and make small, low-quality GIFs. GIFFFFR is a web application that was built to solve that very problem: enter a YouTube video, select your size and time, add a caption, and you have a high quality GIF that can be directly uploaded to various platforms for social sharing.

Using modern HTML5 and JavaScript, all of the rendering of the video to GIF is client-side with low server overhead and no back-end processing of the image. GIFFFFR was covered by multiple blogs and online magazines, including The Atlantic, FastCo.Labs, Yahoo! Tech, and Wired, as well as making the front page of Product Hunt.

After launch, GIFFFFR partnered with Giphy, the leading (and most fun) GIF sharing platform on the web to become their primary tool for creating GIFs from videos and uploading directly to Giphy. This partnership also led to an increase in capabilities — users were now able to use not only YouTube videos, but also Vevo, Vimeo, Vine, and a whole list of other sites as their GIF creation source, as well as see these animated GIFs in action when sharing to Twitter and Facebook. During this time, GIFFFFR users uploaded over 2,700 GIFs to the platform, leading to over 228 million views and the top GIF getting almost 24 million views on its own.

Once the partnership was concluded, GIFFFFR was acquired by Giphy to become part of their in-house public facing GIF creation toolkit.