WhatsApp has finally joined the ranks of social messaging apps that have GIF support, which is nearly all of them. Yes it’s a bit late and the update is only for the iOS version of the app (us Android users will have to wait an undetermined amount of time for GIF support) but the Facebook-owned app is playing catch up by including some nifty features when it comes to GIFs.
Instead of just being able to share GIFs stored on your phone, WhatsApp will also let you search through Giphy’s vast repository of animated pictures, similar to Facebook’s Messenger. But the best addition has to be the powerful GIF editor, which lets you add captions, stickers and even drawings to your GIF, whilst also trimming it. It seems companies are still borrowing elements from Snapchat. And what’s more, WhatsApp will also let you convert videos that are six seconds or shorter into GIFs, one just has to select the video from their media gallery to convert it to a GIF.
And lastly, since this is coming to iOS first, WhatsApp have included Live Photo support by letting you send your Live Photos as GIFs.
GIF support was initially available on the beta version of WhatsApp, for both Android and iOS, over the past few weeks.
