All posts in “Animated GIF”

Adding animated GIFs to your content toolbox

May 4, 2012 / Comments Off on Adding animated GIFs to your content toolbox / Posted in: Blog

Brandon Oliver Smith is Research and Insights Analyst at Social Media Group.

Last July, I reviewed a new iOS app called Loopcam. Loopcam made it easy for users to capture GIF images and publish them to a variety of social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Since then, the animated image space has seemingly exploded with a handful of new apps like GifBoom and Gifture, format spin-offs called Cinemagrams and a couple kick-butt examples of how the animated GIF format can be a valuable addition to a brand’s content toolbox.

Opening Ceremony - Pixel Geometry

Opening Ceremony – Pixel Geometry

Not surprisingly, fashion brands have been some of the first to adopt the alternative image format. Movement within images allow shoppers to get a more realistic sense of how wearable items are. Traditionally, this sense of realism is communicated using video which while becoming increasingly commonplace, still suffers from some accessibility, portability and sharability challenges.

Burberry - London Fashion Week 2012

Burberry – London Fashion Week 2012

The small footprint of the GIF format allows it to circumvent some of the challenges encountered with video. GIF files are typically small in size and like standard images, theyß can be saved to the desktop with a simple right click save as.

The popularity of GIF blogs have already shown a strong demand for the cheeky format on sites like Tumblr. Taking the audience demographics of Tumblr into consideration, it only makes sense that brands should showcase products using a content format that’s already popular with the target audience.

General Electric Innovation

General Electric Innovation

Animated GIFs are also proving to be valuable content assets for industries far removed from the fashion world. The iconic General Electric recently showed off the epic scale of their manufacturing and design process with GIFs, doing so also cast a light on the company’s ingenuity and dedication to push the boundaries of technology.

The 25-year-old image format is now in the midst of a renaissance. Its endearing qualities are catching the eye of a totally new generation of web user and exploration of it’s applications as a branded content asset are just beginning.


iOS App Loopcam and the Animated GIF

July 28, 2011 / Comments Off on iOS App Loopcam and the Animated GIF / Posted in: Blog

Oh Internet, look how far you’ve come. From AOL optical disks, IRC chat rooms, GeoCities and <blink>questionable design standards</blink> to celebrity profiles, Klout scores and rounding web company valuations to the nearest billion, you’ve seen a lot.

Throughout these times of exponential growth, dynamic change and elevated user expectations, one lone image format continues on, leaving smiles in it’s wake. I’m of course, talking about the Graphics Interchange Format, more commonly known as GIF.

GIF animated banners were a hallmark of the 1990’s Information Super Highway. Often garish and obnoxious, they prompted users to BUY NOW or CLICK HERE with moving images at a time pre-dating HTML5, Flash rollovers and YouTube.

Yet time marches on. And on today’s modern web, the GIF is technically flawed. It’s palette is limited to a spectrum of only 256 colours and it’s file size can become considerably large as new frames are added for increasingly more complex animations. These technical limits, and the death of the GIF’s most popular authoring tool Adobe ImageReady in 2005 played a key role in the formats descent from the public eye.

Until now.

Largely credited to the runaway success of Tumblr, the GIF is beginning to make it’s return to computer screens across the globe. Today’s GIF is supercharged. Gone are the days of banner ads or Peanut Butter Jelly Time, the GIF’s of today are personal short stories told in only a handful of frames.

Introducing Loopcam.

At the time of this post, the freshly pressed iOS app Loopcam might still be news to some. Introduced as a free App to the store in July of 2011, Loopcam let’s users create GIF-loops on the go and share them with their friends across networks like Twitter and  Facebook.

In addition to basic social sharing capabilities, users can also post their GIF-Loops to a shared Loopcam branded Tumblr where uploaded GIFs can be tagged with a username. By linking directly to the tag, users can in essence, hack their way towards a custom profile.

I’ll be completely transparent here. When first using the app, I felt it was missing something more “social”. Perhaps I was expecting something closer to Instagram, where I have an established profile, I can follow friends, add comments and so on.

Yet despite not meeting my expectations initially, I still couldn’t pull myself away from the app and began to realize that Loopcam is a social network (of sorts). It’s not a full blown offering with mass amounts of VC funding and hype like we’ve come to expect but rather a hand-rolled social offering reminiscent of web efforts from a forgotten time.

As if it were mirroring the struggles of the GIF format, Loopcam is also technically limited, yet it’s making excellent use of free web services like Tumblr to remain viable in today’s social web. And yet again, smiles continue to be left in the wake as Loopcam user-base continues to grow daily.

Call it nostalgia or simply a desire to root for the underdog, the fact remains, Loopcam is new, on the rise and trailer loads of fun to use. It’s taught me to not always expect that new web offerings be fully baked and sometimes, it’s the limitations and idiosyncrasies of a service that truly defines it’s value.