Annoy your friends with GIF support in WhatsApp

Alan Martin November 7, 2016

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. That means that this GIF of Donald Trump exchaging policy ideas with a member of staff is worth – by my count – 51,000 words.

Annoy your friends with GIF support in WhatsApp

(Or you could make a solid case for it being worth considerably fewer.)

GIFs have been replacing words on the internet for a very long time, and they’ve finally leaked into WhatsApp with the latest iOS release. You can send GIFs saved on your phone, and – like Twitter – it will also let you outsource your creativity, by searching Giphy for the perfect animation to distil your mood.

You’ll have to bear with me here, because I use an Android device, where the update hasn’t currently rolled out (although the current beta has a more limited GIF functionality), so I haven’t actually seen the new features myself. The Next Web, however, has and explains that WhatsApp has a couple of additional tricks up its sleeve: you can edit GIFs on your phone with captions, stickers and drawings, trim a clip to the right length, and even convert your six-second videos into GIFs on the fly. Live Photos – the iPhone photographs that capture a couple of seconds of video before the image is snapped – can also be sent as GIFs.

There’s no word on when these features will hit Android, or indeed what happens if the GIFed-up iPhone users try to send a GIF to their non-GIFed Android cousins, but you’d imagine it will follow suit soon, for precisely that reason. If you’re stuck on dreary old Android WhatsApp like me, you can at least take some comfort that our current beta contains features that haven’t made the iOS release. Like Snapchat-style filters.

I guess I’ll just stick to using my words for now. And link to cat GIFs like a sucker.