Animated GIFs have become so huge. They're everywhere. But why? On the surface, they're pretty silly—a few frames of video, endlessly looping in time. There are GIFs of Star Trek's Picard facepalming, ...

In an age where your virtual background says more about you than actually being in the call, static backgrounds in Zoom are just plain boring. While Zoom supports video virtual backgrounds, finding an ...

Lorraine Boissoneault | Author, Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene GIFs have gone from still images to ubiquitous forms of communication across the Internet and social media.

The year 2012 was a momentous one for the animated GIF. The popularity of Dump.fm was just beginning to fade, but the platform, which facilitates real-time chat with images, had sparked GIF-making ...

Bloggers and meme-fanatics alike will admit that very few things can convey emotion like an animated GIF, and with almost 23 million GIFs posted to Tumblr everyday, it’s needless to say that the ...

Animated GIFs are everywhere on the internet. They are extremely fun to use, making your message conversation more engaging and bringing life to content when shared on social media sites like emails, ...

While animated GIFs have trampled over still images, Flash animations, and even in some cases video clips as a way to inject multimedia pizazz into text-based content, animated illustrations remain a ...

Welcome to part three of this brief journey through the rich history of one of the newest and most popular art forms, the animated GIF. The previous installments are “The Early Years: 1997–2008” and ...

Google shut down the Tenor API in 2026, forcing Discord, X, and WhatsApp to rebuild their GIF search from scratch. Here's what changes for meme culture.