GIFs have been around for a long time, remember those horrible old sites with bright colors and dancing bananas (or babies)?
More recently Tumblr, and more relevant for us at ChurchMag, Slack have support for GIFs that can be great fun. They can extra depth where a single image wouldn’t and don’t require someone to “press play” like a video. As I love GIFs, I thought I’d share a few things I use to find, manage, and send GIFs better that you may want to use, too.
Giphy to Find GIFs
There are plenty of GIF databases out there, but I usually use Giphy for a couple of reasons. One, it’s a good database with a lot of different GIFs, but more importantly, you can find a GIF keyboard for Giphy AND the iOS app workflow has an action to search Giphy. For Android, there are Giphy apps too and on the desktop, you can add a shortcut in your browser. For me, I made a Giphy search action in workflow (that asks me what I want to search for, then copies the link when I select a GIF) then added an action in my today widget.
Textexpander to Save & Manage
After I’ve found a good GIF, I know that I’ll probably want to use it again at some point. So my next step is to save my GIF into Textexpander, so that I have it on record for another occasion. I use Textexpander on the Mac and Textexpander touch on iOS which syncs snippets between devices so I can access them wherever I am. I start all my GIF snippets with “xgif” and then a short one or two word description. So I have an “excited,” “mario,” “level up,” “get out,” and so on, for my snippets. These are all easy to type and descriptive, so just looking at the title I am reminded of what it is about.
You can get a text expander on Windows and Android (but I haven’t found any that sync on Android yet), so whatever device you have.
Workflow to Make GIFs
Of course, it can be great fun to make your own GIFs as well. For this I use workflow to make a simple GIF camera, this will stitch photos together (I selected 5, but you could choose more or fewer) and then it creates a GIF image which you can share. Once it has been uploaded, you can copy the snippet and use it again later.
What Are Your GIF Tips?
Those are just a few tips I’ve found for having some fun with GIFs and they certainly liven up Twitter conversations and Slack. I’m always looking to raise my GIF game, so let me know if you have any tips below.
Eric Dye says
I need to figure out how to do this for PC…
Chris Wilson says
There are definitely some good text expander option on windows. Just don’t know if any sync with an android device.