Some have called Animated Gifs the backbone of the internet (okay, nobody has ever called them that. But still.) They can tell stories, demonstrate movement, and in a best-case scenario really scare your friends when a picture blinks at them. With this simple app, you can create your own animated Gifs either by taking your own photos or by using pictures stored on your SD card.
Gifinator is an animated gif creator that is super easy to use! Just touch the screen to take pictures, tweak your animation, and share your gif with your friends!
| Category | Score | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Does it Fulfill its Purpose? | 16 | Gifinator certainly gets the job done. It’s very simple, and looks nice, and the options that are present work very well- it’s got built-in effects, it includes an “onion skin” of the previous photo so you can line it up easily, and once you’ve taken all your photos, you can change the speed at which the gif runs. The pro version also includes the ability to hold up to 200 photos and a timer capable of making a time-lapse Gif, as well as the ability to upload your gif to their site (while the normal version can simply send it out via normal channels, such as email or text). However, there are a few options that Gifinator is noticeably lacking. It doesn’t support any resolution other than the native phone’s camera resolution- all of the pictures are automatically resized, which means that although this app is good for making gifs with the device’s camera, it can be difficult to add your own pictures to the mix without them looking stretched. The ability to insert pictures into the middle of a series would be nice rather than just the end. Also, the ability to edit gifs you have created would be useful. |
| Does it Look Good? | 20 | Gifinator looks really nice. Everything follows a simple theme, and the layout looks nice and runs really well. |
| Does it Run Well? | 14 | Gifinator can quickly add up in size. Natively, it runs just over 2MB, but on my phone the app’s data made it end up at over 4MB (though the gifs I made themselves were stored on the SD card- I’m not really sure what was taking up the space). For users with internal storage space concerns, this app can easily become too large. Also, I ran across a bug where attempting to take pictures too fast (more than 1/second) resulted in a blank photo, which crashed the app when I tried to make a gif with it. To the developers’ credit, though, the app actually recognized the crash, and when I returned to it gave me the option to try again. |
| Is it Easy to Use? | 19 | Everything in Gifinator is really simple- I never felt like there was anything confusing, and the layout was logically organized. Customizing and sharing gifs is simple and easy. |
| Is This App Useful to Everybody? | 14 | Gifinator was fun to play around with, but ultimately the usefulness of an app like this is somewhat limited. For those of you who spend time on internet forums or social media, this can be a nice way to create some decent content. Most users, however, will find this app to be a fun diversion and little more. |
| Overall Score | 83 | Gifinator is a fun little app that is worth playing around with. It’s free, so if you have any interest in gifs at all, give it a download- at best, it’s a great tool, and at worst, it’s at least worth a fun afternoon of making silent, cameraphone-quality, low-framerate movies. |
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