Updated GIF Library, Collections and More
Update December 21, 2018: You can now add any GIF you see on Gfycat to a Collection (such as illustrated in the GIF below).
Over the past year, we have released continuous improvements to your Gfycat profile and your GIF library. We rethought albums, folder and bookmarks and created a brand new product to help you manage your amazing content, Collections. The improvements we made make our site even more responsive and faster to load and we hope will help you manage your GIF library, your likes and your saved GIFs more easily so you can get the best out of Gfycat.
Your Gfycat Profile
Update your profile with an image, name, description and URL of your website or other social media profile. When people discover your GIFs on Gfycat or embedded elsewhere, they’re more likely to follow your profile and keep coming back for your new GIFs if you explain briefly who you are, what kind of GIFs you make, what you do, etc.
Likes
Any GIF you like will show up under the Likes tab. Anyone who visits your profile will only see the public and safe for work GIFs that you have liked. Like away!
GIF Library
The original Gfycat interface for managing your GIFs (called Cloud with a white, orange and gray color scheme) had many bugs and ran on an old technical system that was slowing our development down. We made a second attempt in 2016 with Library v1 (which had a blue and white color scheme). This was an upgrade over Cloud, but it lacked some of the same features and still ran on that old system. It was also very slow for users with lots of GIFs in their account (scrolling forever).
The new GIF Library is built on a faster framework and completely replaces Cloud and the first version of Library. It contains key elements from both old features, namely:
- Viewing 25, 50, or 100 GIFs on one page
- Clicking through pages 1, 2, etc. of your GIFs rather than scrolling endlessly
- Editing the Title and Tags of your GIFs
- Seeing the Number of Views and Likes on your GIFs
- Seeing and changing the Visibility status of one or more of your GIFs
- Deleting some of your GIFs
- Adding one or more of your GIFs to a Collection (more on this below)
You can also access your GIF library* directly on your profile by clicking the List View icon and saving a precious second or two if you don’t want to mouse over to the dropdown menu on the top right.
GIF Collections — Old Folders and Albums
We have replaced folders and albums from the old system with GIF Collections on Gfycat. Here are the important changes to note.
- Folders in the old Cloud to organize your GIFs have been converted into unlisted collections (meaning only you can view them unless you change visibility to public)
- All albums have been converted into collections and maintain the visibility status they had before (unlisted or public)
- Folders to organize albums have been completely deprecated and are not coming back
- If you used folders to organize bookmarks, please see the next section
Similar to albums previously, you can make collections either public (anyone can discover it on your profile or if you share the collection link somewhere) or unlisted (only you can see).
Saved — Bookmarks
We moved all your bookmarks to the Saved tab on your profile. Only you can view this tab when you are logged into your account. Saved GIFs will always be private.
The old bookmark feature allowed you to organize your bookmarked GIFs into folders. We were unable to efficiently migrate this feature to the new experience with all the other changes explained above. That being said, we have expanded the functionality of Collections.
Upcoming Changes
We will make two additional changes related to GIF library. First, we will expand the functionality of collections and allow you to add any GIF into a collection whether that GIF is yours or someone else’s that you find on Gfycat (mind blown). Second, your saved GIFs will move from their current tab into a private GIF collection called My Saved GIFs (completely private, never able to be made public and discoverable). Along with this, all mention of bookmarks will be replaced with “saved” everywhere.
This has been a pretty large overhaul of our infrastructure and we have rethought the product to enable further features for you and your teams. Our faster response time and using the latest technologies means we’ll be able to scale infinitely better with more GIF viewers and more GIF creators.
Thank you for bearing with us! We value your feedback on the GIF library so please send us a message if you have any thoughts or suggestions you’d like to share. Start uploading and making GIFs today in order to make the most your GIF library and take the new Collections for a spin.
*Note: If you are an iPhone or iPad user, you can log into your account on the Gfycat app and more easily share your GIFs using the app, the Gfycat iOS keyboard, or the Gfycat iMessage app extension (which are all contained in the app). You can do the same on Android user except we don’t have a keyboard or text message extension there.
Originally published at gfycat.com.
