I was sending GIFs over the weekend to greet some friends and most of them had no idea how to create and send a GIF on Whatsapp and whether it’s available for Android & iOS. To be honest, I wasn’t aware of that option up until the weekend when a friend of mine sent me a GIF (Thanks Wajid), and I thought he was using some third party app, but it turned out to be a very easy and straightforward new feature on Whatsapp.

Here’s how you can turn your videos into GIFs:

Step1: Go to Whatsapp, select one of your contacts and click on the “attach” icon. Choose Gallery afterwards and go to your videos.

Step2: Select any video, shorten it to 6 seconds or less. Once done, a small video icon will appear on the right upper side. When you click on it, it will switch to GIF. Keep it as “GIF” and send the video, it will show as GIF to the recipient.

As soon as you create/receive your first GIF, you’ll see a new GIFs option next to Images and Videos and you will be able to forward those GIFs to all your contacts as well (as long as they are using a compatible version of Whatsapp).

On another note, here are some recently introduced Whatsapp features that a lot of people are still not aware of:

1- When you are typing a message, you can click on the small camera to snap an instant picture and customize it with Emojis. You can write and draw on the photos as well.

2- When you are using Whatsapp Desktop and you’re listening to music at the same time, you can mute alerts and sounds for 1 hour, 1 day or 1 week.

3- You can now tag individuals in group chats (using @), turn your text into bold, italics and use Strikethrough. You can also quote the original message in your replies now.

– Add an asterisk (*) before the first letter and after the last letter to turn your text into bold.
– Add an underscore (_) before the first letter and after the last letter to turn your text into Italic.
– Add a tilde (~) before the first letter and after the last letter for Strikethrough.

Enjoy!