Share Your Awesome Animated Gifs With Gifture
Gifture (Free) by Toaast is an app for creating animated gifs and sharing them with others around the world.
Since Instagram got bought out by Facebook a couple of weeks ago, many have jumped ship. But where to? Well, here's another option to consider — Gifture. This could be the next Instagram — after all, who doesn't like animated gifs?
However, I was not drawn in to the app by the fact that it is all about animated gifs. I was more attracted to how the app looks — it’s gorgeous. The icon is beautiful too, and definitely reminds you of Instagram. The app features a matte chrome interface, but has a bright and sunny orange palette when you pull the screen down to refresh. Everything is responsive, and you can see that a lot of care has been put into the making of this fun app.
To sign up for Gifture, you can either log in with Twitter or Facebook, or create a new account with an email address. Once your account has been set up, the fun begins.
Since this is another micro social network, you should find out if any of your friends are using the app too. To do this, simply go to the Account tab, and tap on Find Friends. Gifture can search through your Contacts (with your permission), Facebook, or Twitter (native iOS 5 integration). Additionally, there are suggested users that you can check out as well.
When you have users added, you will be able to view all of their gifs in the Feed tab. Like Instagram, you can double-tap a gif image to like it, and you can even add comments, if you are so inclined. Popular will show what’s currently trending on Gifture, though it has a neater animation when you refresh for new images. The Activity view allows you to see what your friends are up to (who they’re following and what they’re liking) or you can see notifications for yourself (new follows, likes, and comments).
The best part of Gifture, though, is making your own gifs. The app allows you to capture new images, or you can even import photos from your Photo Library. When importing, you can import up to 20 images. When in capture mode, you can snap photos one-by-one, or use the “automatic” mode, which will capture up to 20 frames — just tap on the number to change the amount of frames.
Once the images are captured and put together for your gif, you will be able to see how it turned out. Gifture also provides users with eight filters to apply to the gif, and you can also change the frames per second — from one to 10. Then give it a caption, select Twitter or Facebook if you want to share it, and then submit it for everyone to see! It’s really that simple.
A neat thing about Gifture is that the app caches all images that you load, so that you don’t have to download them again the next time you open the app. It will only download new images, and immediately cache them. If you prefer to not have this (it will build up over time), you can always clear out the cache from the app’s settings (in Accounts).
I found Gifture to be a fun and beautifully designed app for creating and sharing animated gifs. It also makes a great Instagram alternative if you just do one shot. Hopefully, future updates will bring in more filters.
The app is free, so give it a go and share your cool creations!
