Skip to main content

Sure, Instagram video is cool, but now you can turn Vines into animated GIFs

gif vine appInstagram debuted video today, and it looks pretty cool. As long as it complements the existing Instagram experience and doesn’t slow it down, it’s a welcome addition – and yet another sign that Facebook is close on Twitter’s heels, since Instagram video is clearly meant to nip into Vine’s burgeoning fan base.

Despite the offensive move, Vine isn’t slowing down – and neither are developers working off the platform. Third parties are providing a variety of entertaining services, like Vinecrawler, and a new service called GifVine. GifVine lets you turn your Vines into full-fledged GIFs, so if you take a looping video and want to show it to the Internet in GIF format, now’s your chance. It’s very simple: You just copy and paste the URL of your Vine into a box on the GifVine website, and voila! It is now a beautiful GIF. 

Gifvine makes funny Vines even funnier. Like this one I made from a Vine my younger brother took while pranking my sister by hiding in the dryer. 

GifVine is great because you don’t always want to embed the entire Vine in your posts; it will also allow you to convert Vines and make them searchable on sites like Giphy. It turns a specialty video into a more basic file format that can be shared easily. Plus, everyone loves GIFs.

There are a few different ways that Instagram video has an advantage over Vine. For one, it already has a robust desktop browser, while you can only view Vines from your computer if they’ve been linked on Twitter, or if you use something like Vinepeek, which shows you random Vines from all over the world. And the filters that Instagram video offers, plus Cinema, its image stabilization technology, will let Instagram video users create more professional-looking videos, whereas Vine  videos look distinctly like Vine videos and nothing else, so they’re not quite as versatile. 

Vine teased some upcoming improvements today in an effort to swerve some of the hype back its way, and from what they’ve shown, the upgrades may be substantial. There will almost certainly be a redesign allowing Vines to take up the whole screen, and there may also be a feature that lets you record multiple videos at once. Messaging may also be on the agenda. Vine hasn’t yet officially announced the added features, but the teasers make it clear that there are several. So it’d be a shame if people started discounting Vine while it’s still in its infancy. Since Twitter no longer supports Instagram photos in-house, Vine will likely continue to dominate when it comes to Twitter shares, but this Instagram announcement has got to be giving Jack Dorsey the stress bloats. 

Kate Knibbs
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kate Knibbs is a writer from Chicago. She is very happy that her borderline-unhealthy Internet habits are rewarded with a…
Instagram is undoing its TikTok-like changes you hated so much
New features for Instagram Reels

Popular social media service Instagram is reconsidering its pivot to a TikTok-style video feed after recent changes proved to be highly unpopular with its fan base.

Over the past several weeks, Instagram has been testing a version of the app that opened into a feed of full-screen photos and videos, seemingly attempting to morph the service into something that more closely resembles TikTok. Similarly, the new feed also disproportionately pushes seemingly random "recommended" posts, squeezing out content from those folks that Instagram users have actually chosen to follow.

Read more
The new ways Meta will pay you to make content for Facebook and Instagram
facebook hacked

Creators on Facebook and Instagram will soon have more ways to generate revenue from their content.

On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared via a Facebook post (and in a series of comments on that post), a few updates on monetization for creators on Facebook and Instagram. These updates included expansions to existing monetization options, as well as a few new ways to make money.

Read more
What happened to Vine?
vine third year birthday micro video app smart phone ios android

In 2013, the world began to experience the wonder of Vine: Six seconds videos that could be easily recorded and shared with others. The service launched in 2013, and it was a mystery at first, but popularity soon skyrocketed, with nearly 200 million active users by 2015. But only two years later, the ability to upload videos was removed, and by 2017, the service shut down completely. Why did such a popular social platform suffer a swift death -- what happened to Vine?

What was Vine?
Launched in 2013 by three entrepreneurs -- Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll -- Vine was a video hosting service, one that allowed users to share six-second, looping video clips. Users could browse through and discover interesting Vines based on themes, such as comedy or music, and through a section that showcased currently trending Vines.

Read more