Google Images’ latest feature makes it easy to find that perfect shareable GIF

By Christian de Looper Published June 26, 2019

Google has been consistently making Search more and more helpful over the past few months, with features like the ability to share results straight from Search. Now, it’s Google Images’ turn to get a new feature — Google has announced that it’s making it easier to share the perfect GIF with a new “Share GIFs” section, in which you can quickly and easily share GIFs into apps like WhatsApp, Gmail, and Messenger.

Google Images has supported GIFs for some time now, and the new feature itself is powered by Google’s already-established GIF search engine.

The GIFs that will be a part of the Share GIFs section are made available by content creators, streaming services, movie studios, and so on — and any content provider or GIF creator can submit new GIFs to appear in the section, by uploading those GIFs to Tenor.com.

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Of course, it’s easy to imagine that thousands of GIFs will end up appearing in the feature, so Google will be curating the selection a little. According to Google, GIFs will appear in the section based on how likely it is that they’ll be shared, so hopefully GIFs that you want to share will appear reasonably close to the top of the list.

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The new feature is available across platforms, including the Google app for iOS and Android, and in Chrome on Android. It doesn’t seem like the feature is available at all on desktop just yet, but considering the nature of the feature it seems a little more suited to mobile use anyway. Google says that it’s planning on bringing the feature to all mobile browsers over time.

Google Images in general has been getting more features recently. For starters, Google recently announced that Images would be getting shoppable ads to make it easier to find products that you’re interested in online. Not only that, but Google has also been working on object recognition through Google Lens — allowing users to take a photo of an object they’re interested in, and see similar products online that they could, in turn, buy.

The “Share GIFs” feature is rolling out now to the Google app on iOS and Android.

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Christian de Looper

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Christian de Looper is a long-time freelance writer who has covered every facet of the consumer tech and electric vehicle…

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