GIF creation tools for all of us

GIF tools are pretty diverse. Many people use Photoshop and other professional tools that come at a steep price and have a steep learning curve. These tools deliver a pretty awesome GIF result as they become more proficient with the tools. This works for many professionals and we love the content they create, be it cinemagraphs, Confused Travolta memes and retro GIFs to name a few. They and the more casual creators come to Gfycat for the primary objective of hosting their content on a world class platform with a global reach.

At Gfycat, speed is in our DNA and this applies to the creation tools as well, where we have always focused on speed and time to creation. Our creators will be watching a movie, a game or a show, glimpse an exciting moment that they want to eternalize or edit, upload it, et voila! All the magic happens in the background so we deliver to you a unique URL that you can use on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc. We take care of all the technical details so you focus on the content. Our tools were first-class but we wanted to make the creation experience even more delightful.

What was great:

1. Speed: You submit a video file, or a URL to a video from one of the plethora of video sites. You pick the starting time and the duration up to 15 seconds. We deliver in a matter of seconds the URL for you to use.
2. Parellelizing your job: pick a few videos from your laptop/PC and drop them in the gfycat.com tab in your browser. We open the right dialog, fire off multiple uploader functions and deliver in parallel the URLs that you need to tell a story, create an emotion or just share a laugh with your friends and family.
3. Integration with social networks: whether you’re posting to Reddit, Facebook or Twitter, we’ve taken care of all these integrations so you don’t have to. We deliver the right content to the right platform, just share the URL.

What we improved:

1. The UI: the uploader is much more intuitive. It’s now much simpler to see the field for the title, the hashtags and the description. We also make pre-fill the title and the hashtags to get you started
2. The picker: picking the start time and the duration was arduous as you had to open multiple tabs to compare your ideal start time with the text you’re filling. The start picker and the duration picker are now much simplified. For those looking to pick the exact 1/100th of a second, you can do that as well.
3. Captions: a pretty big request from our users who want to augment the time and visual element of Gfycat with a word or a few words that really take it home: IDK, OMG or a simple Hello

In the few weeks since we’ve launched the feature, our users have started titling their content further, adding more hashtags for easier discovery and captioning their content.

We’ve collected a ton of positive feedback and suggestions for enhancements for the new features and are in the process of perfecting our tools to make your job as a creator even easier and more fun.