As a “search engine for gifs”, the company gathered more than 300,000 from across the web, tagged and categorised them, and helped users find exactly the right one for any given situation. That was the problem Giphy sought to solve when it was founded in 2013. The best creators were known for the speed with which they could clip out shareable moments from TV shows or live events as they aired, as well as their ability to massage the format to keep the frame rate high and the file size low.īut while the most dedicated posters kept large archives of their most-used gifs, carefully sorted and labelled, for many, tracking down exactly the right one to use in any situation was a bore. Why reply to a post with “OMG”, when you can post a quick clip of Donald Glover from the sitcom Community walking into a burning room carrying a stack of pizzas?Īt the peak of its cultural impact, making, posting and curating gifs could easily have become a full-time job. Popularised by Tumblr blogs such as What Should We Call Me, which curated a perfect selection of responses to any situation, reaction gifs quickly became synonymous with the format itself. I just learned how to use reaction gifs and the teenagers are now informing me that gifs are 'cringe'- Dan Robinson June 30, 2022

Although gifs were never intended to be a replacement for video, faster internet connections meant they were again the easiest way to share short clips – too short to have meaning on their own but perfect for adding context and colour to posts in the form of the “reaction gif”. Its revival came at the turn of the 2010s, alongside the growth of the social network Tumblr. It exploded in popularity alongside the rise of the web as the easiest way to add motion to a page but it slowly lost ground to other ways of showing pictures that required less of the limited bandwidth of the time.

The animated gif is also comfortably millennial: invented in 1989, it pre-dates not only smartphones and social media but even the world wide web. It’s actually kind of sad how choked out the gif was by large corporations, copyright laws, and mobile browsers.” Rather than what they used to be, which was a decentralised image type for communicating on blogs and message boards. “So now they are basically the cringe reaction image your millennial boss uses in Slack. They were never easy to make and didn’t work particularly well on mobile. The generational divide is real, says the internet culture writer Ryan Broderick. Someone last week told me GIFs are for boomers and I have felt self-conscious ever since- Chris Brown July 14, 2022

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