My Favorite GIF App Features: Vhoto (iOS)

This was a sad message for me that the team at Vhoto tweeted last fall when they were acquired by Hulu. I am grateful, though, that the app is still available in the App Store, and that they have even managed to update the app when it was crashing a couple of weeks ago.

Vhoto is a jewel of an app for many reasons, but my favorite feature is how it claims to pull select stills, or “highlights” from your video. Though this isn’t directly a GIF-creation feature, it certainly is a useful one, and works decently from the videos I’ve tested.

My other favorite thing about this app is that it auto-generates several different media ranging from what it calls the “top GIFs,” to faster and slower versions of your video, and of course, the app’s original promise of finding a slew of still highlights from your video.

Since GIF-type animations in the wild are rarely in the GIF file format (e.g. Instagram) I appreciate that Vhoto allows for your creation to be saved onto your Camera Roll as both a video and/or a GIF file. When you save as a video, though, you apparently lose any of the playback adjustments you may have made…i.e. that super slo-mo clip you just made will only be viewable in slo-mo as a GIF. The video file will only play back at the speed it was captured at. The thought of any GIF creation tool not allowing you to save as a video seems naïve (or too far ahead of its time 😉) at best, and downright inconsiderate at worst.

The thought of any GIF creation tool not allowing you to save as a video seems naïve (or too far ahead of its time 😉) at best, and downright inconsiderate at worst.

This kind of magic — curation of massive troves of images and videos you own — is the goal of many services (Google Photos, Polarr’s Picky app, Magisto, and Picjoy, to name a few). But the fact that Vhoto’s focus is narrowly on curation of still highlights from a single video clip makes the app infinitely more useful.

And because of that, as long as Vhoto still works on the latest version of iOS, it will always have a special place on my home screen.