imgur Releases High-Quality GIF Maker

The bane of GIFs are always their quality — often lacking and unclear. Luckily, image hosting site imgur aims to fix this with its high-quality GIF maker, aptly named Video to GIF. It lets you easily snip clips from streaming videos (like YouTube), and then automatically converts them into a GIF file. Most of the time, the resulting GIF will be converted into a .gifv format, as opposed to the industry standard and typical .gif. The .gifv format is not as easy to share as .gif, which you would normally be able to add as an image into WYSIWYG-friendly editors (such as on Tumblr) and have it display properly. On the other hand, the .gifv format is often treated like a movie file, so it would have to be embedded as a video with code to instruct it to behave like a .gif. GIF makers have been around for ages, with many outlets offering easy converters. However, with Video to GIF bringing quality to the mix, it will be interesting to see how backend editors and users treat the .gifv format.