To Gif or Not to Gif
Once I discovered these little things (pronounced GIF like a present without the "t"... I think lol) I was hooked.
Basically, a Gif is like a picture that is animated.
Think of it like how your Instagram story looks when you use the Boomerang feature.
Today I came across a hilarious Kevin Hart Gif and I really wanted to use it for an Instagram post.
That's when I ran into a couple of problems.
First, when I went to save the Gif like any other picture I rip from the internet, the picture showed up in my camera roll, but it didn't have the animation.
The picture was okay by itself, but the animation is what made it funny, and funny is what I wanted.
After a few Youtube videos, I finally came across a tutorial that explained how the animation was still on the picture, it just doesn't show up in the iPhone camera roll.
To make sure the information was correct, I text the picture to myself.
Sure enough, there it was, animation and all.
The next order of business was uploading it to Instagram.
Instagram has this thing about not accepting videos less than 2 seconds, which is the exact running time of every GIF!
I tried using iMovie to loop the time but that didn't work.
Then I came across the app GifShare.
Not only is it free, but it's easy to use.
Basically, the app turns your Gif into a video, which can be uploaded to Instagram. Here is a video with instructions.
The free version puts a watermark on your Gif, but I wasn't worried about that.
I don't think a lot of people look at your IG posts and think "Oh my, this picture has a watermark".
Problem solved, and it only took 1 hour for me to figure it out lol.