GIFs
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NASA has shared its massive GIF archive with Pinterest and GIPHY
NASA's been making a concerted effort over the past year to share its enormous archive of images and video with the internet. Last October, the agency teamed up with Flickr to feature thousands of Apollo era mission pictures. Thursday, NASA once again opened its vault -- this time to unload thousands more animated GIFs onto its Pinterest and GIPHY pages. If you already have accounts on either of these platforms, you now have full access to NASA's archive. And thanks to GIPHY's API integration, you'll be able to embed these images into your tweets directly from the Twitter app.
Vevo lets you make GIFs from its massive music video library
Vevo just launched a new feature that should help it drive visitors to its recently-redesigned website: a GIF maker. Yes, one thing we can all agree on is that we all love GIFs, and Vevo is making it far easier to mine its massive music video library and turn them into short, shareable clips. The feature will initially launch on the web only, but Vevo says it'll come to its apps down the line.
NASA celebrates 16 years of space living with ISS GIFs
On November 2, 2011, Expedition 1 commander William Shepherd and cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko appeared on camera to celebrate the first long-duration stay on the International Space Station (ISS). 16 years later, NASA is commemorating that event with the best way to celebrate anything on the internet: With GIFs. Here are some of those images.
Giphy is giving orphaned Vines a new home
Yesterday, Twitter announced that it will effectively kill off the struggling short-form video platform Vine in the coming months. The news did not go over very well with the service's fanbase, many many of whom took to Twitter to express their outrage. Today, Giphy offered disgruntled Vine users a lifeline: the ability to transfer their existing video content to the animated image site.
Search for classic GIFs in the Internet Archive's new collection
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the Internet Archive has created a special treat for its visitors: an utterly enormous number of GIFs culled from the original social network, GeoCities. Fittingly, the new collection is dubbed the Geocities Animated Gif Search Engine or GifCities for short. It features a whopping 4,500,000 animated GIFs from the classic internet era of the mid '90s. Even though Yahoo shut down the service in 2009, each of these GIFs links back to its originating page via the Wayback Machine -- just as with the National Archive's collection.
US National Archives gets into the historical GIF game
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) serves as America's historian, cataloging and preserving the nation's most precious documents, audio and video recordings. On Thursday, NARA announced that it had launched a Giphy channel with more than 150 animations to help showcase its vast trove of video content. The administration plans to expand upon that figure with an eclectic mix of classic footage. via GIPHY What's more, every GIF automatically links back to the archive's website which includes additional information on the significance of the piece. The Bugs Bunny gif above, for example, is actually from short titled "Uncle Sam Speaks" and is actually a compilation of savings bond promotions.
YouTube becomes more social with the Community tab
As rumored, YouTube has launched the Community tab in a public beta, making the site more like a social network by letting creators post text, GIFs, live video and more. Mobile users will see the new content in their "Subscriptions" feed and can also get push notifications. It will launch in beta with the Vlogbrothers, The Kloons, AsapScience and just a few other select channels, for now.
Creating and sharing GIFs with Giphy Capture is dead simple
While we might not be able to agree on the correct pronunciation of "GIF" (hint: it's the one that doesn't sound like the peanut butter brand chosen by choosy moms), we can find some common ground on the animated image format's utility. Giphy, the internet's preeminent GIF repository, has dabbled with custom-GIF tools before, but its GIF Maker is a web app and is pretty basic in terms of functionality. With the latest version of Giphy Capture, the outfit is looking to streamline the creation process from any video source and add a few bits that it didn't have prior.
Olympics GIFs got someone temporarily banned from Twitter (update)
You may have heard that the IOC placed a ban on media outlets using unlicensed footage from the Rio Olympics to make GIFs for their social media channels. Of course, since it's 2016 and people have Twitter, that didn't stop some from trying. One of the more popular clips on social media showed Katie Ledecky destroying her opponents in the women's 800m freestyle race, providing enough time for Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana to reach "Man it's a hot one" before another competitor even finishes. While the IOC did have that video pulled, its poster's account remains active. Meanwhile, Jim Weber posts on LinkedIn that after posting three GIFs of Olympic action, his account ended up permanently banned.
Tinder says GIFs and emoji lead to better connections
Who knew that the secret to successful online dating lay in GIFs? The next time you find yourself spending an hour coming up with the perfect greeting and introduction on Tinder, stop and find a GIF instead. According to Tinder's research, GIF messages are 30 percent more likely to receive a response than non-GIF ones.
Why the Olympics need GIFs
The 2016 Olympics kicked off last Friday in Rio de Janeiro, and there have already been a slew of exciting moments. But if you were hoping to catch a GIF of, say, Simone Biles' jaw-dropping floor routine, well, you won't find it from the media. That's because the International Olympics Committee has explicitly banned the press from releasing animated GIFs as well as short Vine videos from the event. The idea behind this policy is seemingly to force folks to watch the clip from an official media site like NBC, where people will be forced to watch ads with their sports. But this ban is woefully behind the times.
Olympic Committee bans press from releasing GIFs
The Olympics is a GIF gold mine, thanks to athletes' superhuman feats of strength, agility and speed, all the crazy fans and the hilarious moments in between. This year, though, the International Olympic Committee will make it harder to find them: it has prohibited the press from releasing animated GIFs and even short videos like Vines.
GIF whatever is on your Android screen with 'Mirror'
Recording your Android screen isn't easy, and unless you have a Chromecast device, mirroring it is also a pain. Koushik Dutta, formerly of Cyanogen and now with ClockworkMod, has updated his Mirror app to make screencasting easier and let you record your screen as a GIF. It works on any device running Android 5 or higher and can mirror out to Fire TV, Apple TV and AllCast receivers on Chrome and Android. Though the app is from ROM-maker ClockworkMod, your phone doesn't need to be rooted.
Tumblr rolls out 'GIF posts' for iOS users
Do you use Tumblr? Do you love GIFs? Do you also have an iPhone? Beginning today, you can start creating GIF posts via the official Tumblr app on iOS.
Google's iOS keyboard is the GIF and emoji app of my dreams
I just deleted the Giphy app from my iPhone. This is notable because I adore GIFs. I find a deep, slightly perverse, pleasure in sending texts full of those little moving pictures to my loved ones, and the Giphy app streamlined my image-hunting process 10-fold. But now, it's gone from my home screen, deleted forever because I found something that makes texting with GIFs even easier. I found Gboard.
Google puts search, GIFs and more inside its new iOS keyboard
Although Google has plenty of iOS apps, switching between them to share directions or perform a web search can be time-consuming. The company knows that the iPhone keyboard is where you spend a lot of your time, so it's decided to launch fresh take on Apple's default option. It's called Gboard and it can search the web, embed GIFs, locate the perfect emoji and grab weather reports. It will also help send restaurant information, flight times and news articles to friends and family. "Anything you'd search on Google, you can search with Gboard," says Rajan Patel, Principal Engineer at Google.
Twitter for Mac lets you search for GIFs when a photo won't do
Twitter launched a handy GIF search tool inside its mobile apps back in February, and now the social network is bring the animated images to the desktop. With an update to the Mac software, users can expect to quickly find an appropriate GIF for the situation, so long as you're using the official Twitter application. The image search looks similar to the mobile version, where clicking the "GIF" button from the compose window brings up a smattering of categories. Of course, there's an old-fashioned search bar too, if you have something specific in mind.
Giphy brings its image search app to Android
Online GIF clearinghouse Giphy debuted a new means of finding and sharing animated GIFs using Android on Tuesday. The Giphy app now empowers users to search the entirety of Giphy's library and share them on multiple platforms -- from Gmail and Messenger to SMS and Twitter. The updated app will hit the Play Store immediately and will finish rolling out to existing users by the end of April.
Drop Google Drive files and GIFs into your Yahoo emails
Yahoo's been busy bulking up its Mail app and its latest feature follows their strategy to play nice with other email and service providers. Now you can include files from Google Drive and even drop in Tumblr GIFs.
'2001: A Space Odyssey' as 569 GIFs tests fair use limits
If there was a grand prize for "Most Work Done to Prove a Point" (and "Fanciest Name Ever") Jean-Baptiste Henri Franck Cyrille Marie Le Divelec would be a contender. For 2001: A Gif Odyssey, the ad agency creator painstakingly chopped Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey into 569 tiny GIFs to find the breaking point of the so-called fair use doctrine. Fair use, as a reminder, is a legal principal that allows people to use copyrighted material for commentary, criticism, news reporting, scholarship or research. At the same time, it also serves as an "affirmative defense" to protect artists.
