A GIF Exporter Worth Its Salt
What’s wrong with the way most animated GIF tools export GIFs? In a word: context.
Like all good design, animated GIF exporters should take into account the person using the application and the circumstances that have caused them to “hire” the application.
Animated GIFs are almost always created for sharing, so it baffles the mind why some GIF creation tools do not offer two basic pieces of information—estimated file size, and social media presets—upfront.
While I applaud many apps like Giphy Cam and Gyfcat, and Vhoto for attempting to accommodate use-cases by allowing both GIF and video exports, and apps like Instagiffer that provide fairly jarring warnings about social media limits, it might be better to start with the question of what the user wants to do with their GIF rather than chastise them after the fact (error prevention).
A small step forward for every GIF creation tool or exporter is to offer some estimation of the eventual file size, a common limiting factor when posting animated GIFs to various sites and email clients.
Photoshop does a great job of this in its “Save for Web” tool, which is probably why so many GIF creators end with a pass in Photoshop (among other reasons, which include color optimization and frame-by-frame editing features, among others). Estimated final file size labeled clearly in any GIF creation tool UI would go a long way.
Another thing that would make GIF creation tools and exporters far more useful are social media presets. With the amount of updates we are all used to for desktop apps and the updates that happen invisibly in web apps, one can imagine that this shouldn’t be too complex of a thing to offer users, even programmatically.
One particularly successful approach to offering social media presets is Landscape, Sprout Social’s tool for preparing static images for social media sites.
By prompting the question of final destination(where do you want to share this?), and focusing the export flow those sites and their constraints, Landscape is far more effective than most GIF tools at getting the user’s “job done.”
It is worth noting, however, that, as of this writing, Landscape will not output animated GIFs properly (i.e. the GIF you upload may be exported back out as a GIF file, but the animation will no longer be there). So even though it’s fantastic for preparing other static images for posting to social media sites, and serves as a fantastic reference for the kind of task flow I am describing, it will not currently help you with your animated GIFs 😐.
Any exporter worth its salt should think about where their user’s GIFs will be posted and help their users prepare the file for that purpose.
