Life

Imgur Just Gave Us The Easiest Way To Make GIFs

I'm going to be as upfront about this as possible, because I have very few brains and very little to hide: I have literally no idea how gifs work. I am aware that there are human beings out there who create them, and I am forever grateful that they decided to take up residence on our planet, because they are truly doing the Important Work. But now, thanks to Imgur's new easy gif-making site Video to Gif, you can be a hero, too. Every last one of us, even the most incompetent internet user in the world (aka, me), can make a gif with this fancy, easy-to-use gif maker.

It's as simple as opening the page, finding a video link with the scene you want to make into a gif, and copying the link into the browser. From there you use a super intuitive video cropping tool to pick where you want to start the gif and cut it off, and you can even add text. I was reluctant to get my hands dirty with something that is usually so far beyond my reach, but even I got the hang of it. Here's what the process looks like:

You plug in your link, and it automatically pulls up the video. Naturally, mine included Amy Poehler. I wanted to get the first second or so of the video gif'd, so I selected it here:

And then I added dialogue text (which I had memorized already, because I have seen this show too many times to admit to the world wide web.)

Then I hit "Create Gif" at the bottom of the page, and VOILÀ! I MASTERED THE INTERNET! It gives you a direct link to the gif, an HTML link, and pretty much any other kind of link you can think of. Here is the end result of mine:

And because I love Amy Poehler, I couldn't resist making a few more:

My only two complaints:

  1. You have to account for the app cutting off the first few miliseconds of whatever video you're using, so you kind of have to back up your start time to a teensy bit further back than the actual start time it will give you. Still, for something this easy, a little guesswork isn't too high of a price to pay.
  2. There is an 80 character limit on the text, and you can't do more than one line.

That's about the limit of what you can do text-wise (and you'll see again from the weird cut-off that it's a few milliseconds off from where I kept trying to make it). It's not the most refined form of gif-making, but for people like me who relish the easy tech tools, it's at least a good start.

Images: NBC