This is a pretty cool idea and, surprisingly, hasn’t been done already.  I guess with how easy it is to embed video now, most people don’t have a lot of use for animated .GIF files anymore except as avatars and advertisements.  Still, they are useful enough for some people that I would have thought the idea of taking video and turning it into an animated graphic file would have been done.

Gifsoup.com does it and they do it for free, even.  You don’t even have to sign up for an account.  You can give them any YouTube video URL, select ten seconds from that video, and the site produces an animalted .GIF file out of it.  That’s basically it.

The animated GIF, of course, has been around since the beginnings of the graphical Web.  I remember when most websites in the mid-90s had the same slew of animated GIFs all over them.  From rotating stars to bouncing @ symbols, they were what made those early websites “interactive.”  It didn’t take long for them to become design and marketing taboo, of course, but at first, they were the hallmark of the “new” Internet.

Once Al Gore left the progression of his invention so he could pursue politics, the Internet and WWW quickly got beyond the animalted GIF and went on to other things.  Like hockey stick graphs and Flash.

Well, animated GIFs are making something of a comeback now, as more and more alternative sites (blogs mostly) are using them as eye-catchers.  Like anything else, if they’re done right, they look great.  Most of the time they’re not, of course, but welcome to design.  One man’s beautiful graphic is another’s trash heap.

As animated GIFs, of course, the short clips you can make with Gifsoup don’t have sound and are rather choppy.  So the idea works with some videos much better than with others.  Here’s how it works:

First, you give the site your video’s URL (for this, I used Weird Al Yankovic’s White and Nerdy, one of the greatest songs ever (re)written).  Then you give your GIF a title and category type (Gifsoup keeps the GIFs it makes on the site, rotating the latest makes through the front page).  Then you’re presented with a page that has the video embedded, your chosen category and title, and a table to put in the minute/second to start and stop with.  A preview of your choice is shown so you can adjust the timing as you need to get what you want.

For the above video, I chose to start at about about the 1:00 mark and run for ten seconds (max allowed).

Once you click “Finish,” you’re given a download for the GIF and you’re done!  Easy, fun, and free.  Whether it’s useful is up to you to decide.

I should point out that using Gifsoup on anything that isn’t your own is a violation of YouTube’s terms of service (technically), so that’s worth considering before you use it.  Since it doesn’t really link to your YouTube profile, however, it’s not likely anyone will be enforcing this rule except on Gifsoup themselves, if ever.  Caveat emptor and all that.