Making GIFs Is Easier Than Ever With Imgur's New Tool

The image-hosting site announces Video to GIF, a tool that will put the loops absolutely everywhere.

If you're on the Internet, GIFs are everywhere you look. While the looped, silent series of images has become a hallmark of online culture, the process of making them has been somewhat tedious, and making them look good a hard-won skill.

Until now.

While making a truly great GIF is still an artform, Video to GIF, a new tool available today, does away with any barrier to entry. It was made by Imgur, the image-hosting site and online community, and it is impressive. I've had "Learn to make GIFs" on my to-do list for years now, and I just took it off.

I asked BuzzFeed staffers, some of the best GIFfers out there, for what makes a great GIF. Some responses were obvious ("Put Beyonce in them"), but most skewed towards technical advice: frame rates, file sizes, image width, and filters used regularly came up.

Video to GIF is so simple that the days of worrying about technical specifications are mostly over for most GIF makers. You go to imgur.com/vidgif and paste a link to a video to it. Then, you select the time you want the GIF to start and end, up to fifteen seconds long. That's it. Video to GIF generates the file for you, puts it on Imgur, and gives you a variety of ways to share it.

Imgur can pull from almost any video streaming site, although being able to pull from YouTube, Vimeo, and Vine should be more than enough for the average user.

Since it's so easy, we decided to GIF a few of YouTube's greatest hits:

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