When Jason Walter first generated the r/ HighQualityGifs subreddit in September 2013, he did so simply as a style to aggregate the GIFs he made in his spare time. GIFs hadn’t yet become the juggernaut they are today: Facebook had just enabled them the month before, and Twitter wouldn’t do so until that November. Even if you wanted to create one, the technical limitations of the shape involved a degree of Photoshop skill to pull off something worthwhile. Preserving them, Walter believed, was just good sense.
“In the beginning, there was maybe a two-megabyte restriction or a ten-megabyte limit[ depending on the platform ], and you had to create something within those constraints, ” Walter says. “It was a skill.” But the challenge was half the fun: his hobby was as much training exercises in economics as it was in software wizardry. Attaining something that looked good required tinkering with the number of colors the GIF contained, or adapting the lossy compression–all for a remarkably brief result. “If you could get to 5 seconds on[ those sizing restrictions] you were lucky, ” Walter says.
Five years later, those conditions are all but a thing of the past; those short loops-the-loops have conceded ground to a more technically and culturally accommodating type of GIF. No longer confined to the inefficiencies of the procedures and intake behaviors of the early social web, the graphics interchange format–or at least what it contains–has entered its next stage. Welcome to the era of the longform GIF.
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