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The Internet is full of GIFs, and for good reason – they are the perfect image format to portray a visual loop compressed in a very small size. They go well with the widespread mobile usage – their loading time is short and they use very little mobile data. They are easy to share and embed, whether in blog posts, chatting and, yes, as part of your portfolio website, too.

GIFs are not usually known for their high quality, but they can render 256 colors in 8-bit color images. That’s why, the sharper looking GIFs you might commonly find online portray mostly geometrical figures, logos or 3D renders. This is the general tone set by the majority of GIF posters, but that’s not all GIFs can be.

The greatest thing about your GIFs is that they can create a meaningful context or portray emotions. They create an unseen bond with the viewer and a sense of fulfilled expectation. They are super easy to add to your liveBooks website. These reasons alone should convince you to at least give GIFs a chance to be part of your portfolio.

Create GIFs from photos

Adobe Photoshop is the best tool to use when the source of your GIFs is your image gallery. Head over to the Adobe help page for a short and great tutorial on how to create animated GIFs from your images. The plus side of using your dedicated software when creating GIFs from images is quality control in a private medium.

Use snippets from your videos

Sharing videos is great, but creating GIF teasers from your videos to add them to your home page grid gallery is ten times as awesome. You can create GIFs from videos in Photoshop, and the link in our previous paragraph has a section dedicated to that.

You can also use online GIF creators such as Giphy – it creates GIFs from your YouTube or Vimeo videos, but you can also upload your video source from your computer. While the resulting GIFs come in good quality and don’t have a watermark, each time you create a GIF it is automatically uploaded to the Giphy library.

GIFs on your liveBooks site

You can add GIFs to your site just like you do with any other image – add them to your image collection or straight to the image block. They act like any other image, so you can adjust their widths, add overlays or hover effects, or even set them as backgrounds.

Our suggestion is to use them in grid type galleries, where their size is usually smaller. This way they will create the awesome dynamic effect without looking too grainy.

The pronunciation debate

You can say it like in gift, or like the peanut butter Jif – the debate is still on. But one thing’s for sure, regardless of how you want to pronounce it, you should give GIFs a try on your website.

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