Innovation! New YouTube Feature Now Allows Users To Create Their Own GIFs

A new innovation is here and social media users can now enjoy making their own YouTube GIFs on the video sharing website.

When people share or view a video on YouTube, they can now choose to get a 'GIF' version from the options. This allows them to select certain sections from the video and then add text to create gif that lasts up to six seconds.

GIF means Graphics Interchange Format and is a bitmap image where users can take out smaller sections from a video then let it play repeatedly. The new GIF feature by YouTube provides a simple link to the image and code so that users can embed it on websites.

The new YouTube GIFs creator was a plan shared by the site creators in November 2014. The idea is to allow its users to directly make GIFs from any compatible clip.

ARS Technica wrote that a creator preview demo was presented by YouTube in November to show users how users can directly make GIFs on the website. The launch became official in the second week of December after YouTube user Andy Baio discovered on a PBS Idea Channel video the GIF menu hidden in the share part.

Currently, the YouTube GIFs creator has a very simple and limited approach. Users may add text to the top and bottom of the resulting GIF. More advanced characteristics like size, animation speed and others cannot be adjusted.

Also, YouTube users cannot search through a video and make a GIF from several scenes. This means that GIFs made will only have to come from one continuous section. Another major drawback is that YouTube users can only use the gif option for videos located on the PBS Ideas Channel for now.

Based on an IGN.com report, it is not yet certain whether YouTube will subsequently allow users to get videos from other online places or users can add the tool to videos later on.

A representative from YouTube did not reveal if there will be other output formats such as GIFV or if there will be more output features and capabilities for YouTube GIFs in the following weeks. The creators may still be in the testing stage.

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YouTube GIFs
YouTube
GIF
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