With This Amazing Polaroid Camera You Can Now Print Your GIFs

Let’s kick this off by weeding out the unworthy shall we? The creator of the GIF Steve Wihite has confirmed that it’s pronounced JIF, so all you purists spouting off about hard G’s can just pipe down. Got that? Great. Now that that’s cleared up, let’s move on to the newest development in the internet’s new favourite way to avoid using actual words. The Instagif, created by Redditor Abhishek Singh, is a combination of old school aesthetics and modern day technology which allows you to record and ‘print’ physical copies of your own GIFs.

We say print but don’t expect some Harry Potter-esque moving polaroid to stick on your fridge, the concept itself is slightly more prosaic. The 3D printed casing is modelled after the SX-70 Polaroid OneStep camera and functions in a similar manner. After you record a video of a few seconds it outputs the data to a cartridge that contains a Raspberry Pi connected to a PiTFT screen. The clip is then played on a loop until you overwrite it with a new clip.

So if you were wondering about the purpose of this doohickey, truth is, it has none. As Abhishek puts it himself “Don’t ask me why I built it, it sounded like a fun challenge and I always wanted to hold a moving photo.” And in this he succeeded entirely, everything about the design is attractive and amusing and if you have the skills, you could make one of your own. Abhishek has shared the entire process along with directions and blueprints for the build on his Imgur page so go ahead and tap into your inner techie and get GIFing.