In Honor of GIF’s 25th Birthday, Our 3 Favorite GIF Apps

Zach Davis Jun 16, 2012 Tweet

Yesterday our favorite photo format, the almighty .GIF, turned 25. It seems just like yesterday they first learned how to play the piano.

It was 1987 when CompusServe released the Graphics Interchange Format to replace the much more limited Run Length Encode (RLE) file, which only supported black and white. Little did they know of the snowball they had just tossed the mountain. In a world with retina display monitors, blue ray, and 3D high definition, the simple low-res GIF still stands as a fan favorite amongst the Internetting population.

And in honor of this momentous event, I will share my three favorite .GIF apps.

1) GIF SHOP

The first mobile app creator to make it big on the iTunes store was GIF SHOP, a sleek and simple .gif creation and distribution tool. GIF Shop easily allows you to capture a video, select the frames for inclusion, play forward and backward, and adjust the speed.

GIF SHOP is $0.99 and available only for the iPhone.

2) GifBoom

GifBoom has added a lot of new features since the last time we covered them, including a series of Instagram-like filters. For a free app, GifBoom has all the features one could ask for in mobile .gif creation. Unless you’re hell-bent on being able to play your .GIFs in reverse, GifBoom is probably the choice for you.

GifBoom is free and available for both the iPhone and Android.

3) gif text

But what about the times when you don’t feel like creating a gif. There are only so many times where you making a goofy face is funny (28). For those who prefer to defer to the expert gif creators, there is gif text, a library of gifs containing some of the classics including dancing Napoleon Dynamite, angry Bill O’Reilly, and of course, the dramatic chipmunk.