YouTube is adding an automatic GIF creator to videos

by Rich McCormick

Source Andy Baio (Twitter) | Via TechCrunch

Dec 12, 2014, 7:57 AM UTC

YouTube has quietly added an automatic GIF creator tool to a handful of its videos. The new tool, spotted by Andy Baio, allows the creation of GIFs by selecting a section of YouTube video footage from the video’s “Share” menu. GIFs created using the tool can only be a maximum of five seconds in length and have to be cribbed from consecutive video footage, but text can be overlaid on the top and bottom of the image for easy meme creation.

The resultant GIFs are hosted by YouTube itself, and can either be embedded on another page directly as a YouTube video would be, or linked to directly for download. It's yet not clear whether YouTube plans to roll this feature out to all of its videos, when that process may begin, or if channel owners need to agree to make their videos GIFable. The new tool is currently available on all videos uploaded by PBS Idea Channel, but huge YouTube successes, such as Psy's Gangnam Style and Keyboard Cat, and recent hits like Too Many Cooks sadly still lack the option. Should they get the feature though, Tumblr, Twitter, and The Verge's own internal email chains will never be the same again.

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