Giffiti adds animated gifs to your pics so you can rule social media

Fact: everyone loves GIFs

We know you love GIFs. We know you love taking photos with your iPhone and posting them on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. Now you can combine the two with a cool new app called Giffiti (graffiti + GIFs). The app allows you to add animated GIFs to your photos.

The app was created by Nalin Mittal and was announced by a simple post on Reddit. The post quickly went to the front page, and Giffiti was an instant hit, reaching number 14 on the list of US entertainment-based apps for iOS.

How and why to use Giffiti

Mittal’s intention was to create an app called Celebrate for making montages of photographs for birthday parties. It wasn’t quite coming together, but in the process of developing Celebrate, Mittal began to notice the huge popularity of GIF search engines on Reddit and Product Hunt. He switched gears and in three weeks had invented Giffiti.

With Giffiti, you can upload a photo from you camera roll, then select a GIF to overlay on top of the photo. You can move the GIF to the perfect place, and you can resize it as well. The finished product can be saved as either a GIF or a movie file for sharing via text and social media. There is also a library of 100 popular internet memes and celebrities, and you can add special effects. Have a little fun with your social media posts and stand out for the cool person you really are deep down inside!

Probably the biggest challenge for Giffiti is supplying the GIFs themselves. Some are made by the Giffiti team, and others are used with permission from their creators. However, Giffiti also includes GIFs pirated from the web, without permission from or credit to their creators. They’ve already been asked to remove several GIFs, and are cooperating with these requests.

Giffiti hopes to eventually encourage user to submit animations, and to turn a profit by selling premium GIFs.

Note from the Editor: In testing the app for an hour this morning (for science, obviously), we found that animated gifs did not save as animated, and animated videos did not loop more than once, so although we found some serious problems with it, remember, it’s new and doesn’t have a trillion dollars behind it. We had hoped to share with you our creations, but they’re just still images for now, so here are some from Twitter (sad face):

#Giffiti