Giphy Cam makes Instagram and Vine look elderly

This week the folks at the GIF search engine Giphy have re-entered the age of apps. They'd be included in keyboard apps and certainly had been used by mobile users before in web browsers, but with the Giphy Cam, the Giphy crew grow up. They grow up at the same time as they remain childish with a lovely collection of cartoon overlays for the gifs you're about to make. This app captures moving images with your phone and makes gifs of them, fully pumped up and prepared for sharing on all platforms.

When you upload an image to Instagram, it's shareable. The same is true of video. What Instagram wants you to do is share the page where these bits of media are housed. They want people to come to Instagram and stay there. This is their business model – and it's worked for them thus far. It's worked exceedingly well.

What Giphy Cam does is to create a gif instead of a movie. Where apps like Instagram and Vine create movies that aren't particularly easy to retrieve from their social networks to share elsewhere, Giphy is wide open. With this app you'll create gif files downloadable and shareable everywhere.

At this time Giphy Cam is only available for iOS through the Apple app store. You could also try Giphy for Messenger, working with Facebook messenger to share gifs of all sorts – that app is available for Android, too.