Stephen Wilhite was merely trying to solve a technical problem when he invented the GIF, or graphics interchange format, in 1987. As a programmer at the computer-services firm CompuServe, he was ...

The GIF has had an impressively long run amidst the usual short-term churn of the tech industry. One of the earliest ways of displaying animations on the web—long before there was enough bandwidth to ...

Deep in the bowels of the avant-garde, glass and metal MIT Media Lab, graduate student Kevin Hu is making faces into an ornate mirror. He opens his eyes and mouth as wide as possible in a caricature ...

Sometimes, the best response to a group chat or email is a strong GIF—a small animation that can express your feelings much better than you can type them. While you can find plenty of GIFs for every ...

Of the many social networks present on the internet, Twitter is one of the most lively, telling, and communicative platforms of all. A large part of this has to do with the interactive behavior that ...

Get a compelling long read and must-have lifestyle tips in your inbox every Sunday morning — great with coffee! Wired recently profiled a couple of guys at the MIT Media Lab, both of whom are working ...

Even if you’ve never heard of Steve Wilhite, the amount of time you’ve spent staring at computer graphics powered by technology he created may be incalculable. Wilhite did not come up with the GIF ...

Recordit features direct uploading of GIF files to the Recordit servers from where you can further distribute the file or download it for your own use. It is available in both free and paid versions.

I have a love/hate relationship with animated GIFs. They’re often funny, but they can also be annoying—thank goodness Twitter banned them from profile pictures. There are times, however, when GIFs can ...