Popular Photo App VSCO Gets Into GIF Making With DSCO

As GIFs become a more popular means of online expression, many app developers are looking to build ways to make it super easy for the consumer to make their own GIFs. Thursday, popular photo editing app VSCO is entering the fold by releasing DSCO, an ultra-simple GIFmaker for your smartphone.

I've already used VSCO for photo editing, so I wasn't surprised by the look and feel of DSCO. Both apps have a really nice aesthetic to them—simple, streamlined, and based on elegantly descriptive icons rather than words to cater to a global, multilingual user base.

Like Boomerang, the app released by Instagram last week, you create GIFs on DSCO by pressing and holding a button. But Boomerang stitches a burst of photos into a 1-second result, whereas DSCO takes video and translates it to a GIF-like clip. (DSCO allows 2.5 seconds of video.) I only played around with DSCO for a few days, but it took just minutes to learn.

After you capture your footage, you can swipe left to scroll through a number of filters, then upload it to VSCO's image-sharing platform, which is sort of a cross between Tumblr and Instagram. There are, of course, options to share your creation on any of the major social media platforms as well.

But when I spoke to VSCO founders Joel Flory and Greg Lutze on the phone Wednesday, they seemed really focused on turning VSCO's own native platform into a new kind of image-sharing community. As Lutze told me, "The VSCO platform doesn't incorporate likes or comments, so people have the ability to more freely express themselves…What people will use the DSCO app to create is very likely going to be different from what the other [apps] create, and we're excited about that."

VSCO's platform already has its own group of die-hard fans, and DSCO was intended at least in part as a gift to them. Flory said DSCO "was really built for the VSCO community, and [is] something that we hope will also allow for more people to be introduced to the VSCO community."

"There've been many GIF apps before us and, to be quite honest, there'll be many more that come after after us…GIFs are just the next of many steps in the evolution of the tools for creating content on VSCO's platform," Flory told me.

DSCO is currently available on iOS with plans for an Android release (no set date yet), and is free to download. It remains the best option for GIF creation I've seen, but whether it will enhance VSCO's visibility as an image-sharing platform remains to be seen.