The art of the porn GIF

Welcome to Porn Week, Mashable's annual close up on the business and pleasure of porn.

When the GIF became the internet’s preferred visual language, it simultaneously became the preferred lust language for many consumers of adult entertainment.

Porn GIFs distill any variety of adult video into a looping image that can last from mere seconds to a full minute. But the short-form format isn’t all that’s unique about porn GIFs. Many of the folks we talked to — from aficionados to NSFW GIF creators themselves — say it is by far their favorite, if not their only, form of porn consumption, and for good reason.

“The perfect GIF is the climax of a certain porn scene or video, e.g., where an actor unclasps their bra to reveal their breasts, or pulls down their briefs to reveal a throbbing penis, or the moment where full penetration occurs,” said Reddit user SparklyRen, a lawyer in his late 20s who identifies as gay and moderates various subreddits like r/GayPorn and r/GayGifs (currently at 92,000 members). “GIFs are hyper-sexual bursts of media.”

While seemingly simple, making porn GIFs requires its own kind of craft. You not only need to be proficient with certain editing tools, but also patient enough to search for videos that will translate well into the GIF format. On top of all that, you need to have a good eye for deliciously succinct sexiness.

“I've been making porn GIFs for over five years now, and I think it's the best way to express and share my sexual desires creatively,” said the Footprince, who runs the Sockfetishgifs Twitter account (often crossposted to r/socksgonewild), despite identifying as asexual himself. Not all porn GIFs, for the record, need mass appeal; they often thrive because they serve niche tastes and sexualities that tube sites don't cater to.

“Something about a GIF is like pop music or fast food: instantly consumable,” said Reddit user 88Remmer, who moderates several of the most popular porn GIF subreddits, like r/bestporngifs (currently at 175,000 members). “I think people also love them because they’re usually easy to watch on-the-go in the smartphone age, and they’re usually small, data-wise, so you can save the ones you like.”

For many porn GIFers, part of the appeal is also growing your own little collection of favorites you can always come back to for a quick and easy self-love session.

Beyond format, what really makes porn GIFs such a unique genre of adult entertainment is how their popularity has been kept alive through dedicated communities that continue to make the genre thrive in new ways.

“The porn GIF is mostly a social thing,” said the Digital Pimp, who runs websites like Gifsfor and Gifporntube. “Adult communities love to post and trade them with one another. It gets people talking, rather than watching a video alone and just getting off.” Beyond that, the social aspect, “is great because you have the possibility to discover more content you didn't know about.”

That was especially true with Tumblr, the platform that originally popularized the porn GIF. You could endlessly scroll through an account that fit your taste or hashtags that introduced you to new types of porn. At least, before Tumblr torpedoed itself by banning all adult content from the platform.

But the legacy of the porn GIF continues today, primarily through dozens of subreddits, many of which boast hundreds of thousands of members. Of course, there are also dedicated websites like the Digital Pimp’s, as well as Redgifs, essentially a NSFW Giphy. But the porn GIF format has proven so powerful that it basically created a whole subgenre of short-and-to-the-point adult entertainment, which has infiltrated far more mainstream social media platforms than Reddit or Tumblr — like Twitter.

“Small porn videos or snippets are essentially an evolved form of the GIF,” said the Digital Pimp. “When we talk of GIFs, we aren't really talking about just .gif files anymore. It's .mp4, and whatever else. Some even have sound now.”

The porn GIF niche might take up less time and digital space than a full-length video. But clearly, its impact is greater than its file size.

Where the porn GIF lives: Past, present, and future

The rise of the porn GIF can almost entirely be attributed back to Tumblr, with the platform’s unfortunate censorship leaving a hole that no other has yet been able to entirely fill.

Sparklyren vividly remembers the first porn GIF he ever encountered on Tumblr. He’s kept it saved in his personal files, transferring it from phone to phone over the years out of sheer sentimentality. It shows three extremely strapped young men pleasuring each other and themselves on a brightly lit marble kitchen countertop.

It is, indeed, very hot.

“My world was changed after I first saw GIFs on Tumblr. I certainly think that it changed the game for porn, too. It added a new, different dimension,” he said. “What makes GIFs so perfect in today's age of fast consumerism is that they're so bite-size. Tumblr's timeline was busy! And it was built upon endless scrolling, which means that you had to hook your audience and followers within the first instant.”

The Tumblr porn GIF didn’t make you trudge through any cheesy storylines or cringe-y forced setups. It immediately engaged you, earning people's reblogs and upvotes by being universally tantalizing. It’s a format that fits the fast pace of internet culture way better than regular, full-length porn videos — which seem like a relic of the past, when XXX adult VHS tapes were the most high-tech method of getting off.

Tweet may have been deleted

“The best part about GIFs is they're usually repeating the most interesting parts of the porn they're sourced from,” said the Footprince. “Most people who like cumshots aren't going to want to sit through six minutes of cheesy dialogue to see seven seconds of climax. That's what I like the most about it: They’re essentially highlights in full motion.”

Ease of use and brevity are, undoubtedly, at the heart of porn GIFs' lasting appeal. But they don’t just save you time and effort. On Tumblr, they were a refinement of the often inelegant material of full-length porn, creating almost elevated adult entertainment experience.

“Porn GIFs focus mostly on the, for lack of a better term, good stuff,” said one avid Tumblr porn GIF consumer who will go by Alex (not their real name), and identifies as a non-binary demisexual.

Funnily enough, Alex could also immediately summon to mind the name of their favorite Tumblr porn account — italiansd0itbetter (which now appears to live on through Twitter) — though it’s been years since they visited. “On Tumblr, I didn’t have to scrub through 10 minutes of footage for a nice shot, or the good angle, or past the unfortunate angle of some dude's balls. It was just: Here’s a curated selection of five GIFS that are only the good parts.”

The fact that porn GIFs are predominantly shared on platforms that aren’t actually porn websites is another part of what makes them more appealing to folks who might be intimidated or otherwise put off by sites like Pornhub. “There are no ads, no buffering times, no surprisingly loud audio,” the Footprince summed up.

Also, Tumblr was a platform predominantly made up of women and LGBTQ folks, which made it a safe place for them to enjoy porn in a way they couldn't on mainstream tube porn sites. Alex wouldn’t say that, on the whole, Tumblr porn GIFs were all that different from traditional porn. Rather, it’s that LGBTQ and women-oriented porn had more of a platform there, where searches for Trouble Films (a trans porn studio) and “queer porn” proved far more fruitful than anywhere else on the internet at the time.

“Tumblr GIF porn is where I encountered a lot of gay porn for the first time — specifically, the cockyboys imprint, which was very popular, and the kink stuff associated with Mormon Boyz,” said Alex. Others agreed, seeing GIF porn and specifically the Tumblr platform as better suited to exploring more niche and various types of porn.

“Porn communities, and by extension, porn GIF communities, definitely lost a sense of place when Tumblr was censored,” said Sparklyren. He was forced to turn mostly to Twitter and Reddit, though he revisits Tumblr from time-to-time for the softcore stuff it still allows. “GIFs are truly difficult to get a hold of nowadays after the big Tumblr scourge,” he said. Which is why he's had to resort to searching for raw footage that he could use to create and continue the legacy of NSFW GIFs on his own.

For Alex, though, the Tumblr crackdown has made it near-impossible to enjoy the format anymore.

“There isn’t an easy way to search or anything. I tried Bing (no joke) because I heard their porn search was better. But it wasn’t,” they said. “I tend to look up animated porn or ‘Snapchat’ on porn Tube sites to watch there now, where it’s that shorter snippet-style porn.”

The death of Tumblr inevitably led to Reddit becoming the predominant home for porn GIF communities, but it has its own drawbacks. Both Sparklyren and 88Remmer mourn the lack of endless scrolling, since Reddit requires users actually click on GIFs before they play. But both have found admittedly imperfect workarounds. Sparklyren suggests the Apollo Reddit iOS app, which autoplays GIFs and recreates a bit of the Tumblr vibe. 88Remmer said Redgifs attempts endless scrolling, too, but is plagued by freezing issues.

For Sparklyren, Twitter is the lesser of substitutes for Tumblr because it doesn’t have as strict a time limit as Reddit, which caps a GIF to his preferred one-minute length. “I still find myself scrolling past many Twitter videos, even though they might only be two minutes long,” he said.

That’s why, “at the moment, I do think Reddit is a perfect platform for GIFs, mainly based on its support for many media file types. I like Reddit's upvoting system, too, as it attributes a clear ‘score’ of how good a GIF is.”

Unfortunately, the displacement of porn GIFs from Tumblr onto more mainstream platforms like Reddit and Twitter has also led a lot of the most popular content to become, well, more normie.

“There are subreddits for certain fetishes, but they rarely seem to dominate in subreddit size or upvotes. It seems that the general population’s tastes are kinda vanilla,” said 88Remmer.

“Vanilla porn GIFs definitely perform better,” said Sparklyren. He also doesn’t love that gay porn GIFs are still very catered to a heteronormative gaze, with “gay-for-pay” heterosexual performers the main LGBTQ representation in mainstream adult entertainment. In general, it remains difficult to bring more diversity to the palette of porn GIF subreddits, because GIF makers are limited to what’s available through Tube porn sites.

“Once porn studios diversify their rosters, I hope it will carry over to the types of porn GIFs we see — more Black content, more trans content, more for women,” he said.

Tweet may have been deleted

At the same time, Sparklyren is heartened by the fact that there’s a GIF subreddit for almost every taste, fetish, or niche. Also, he pointed out, the r/PornGifs and r/GayGifs subreddits have almost the exact same number of subscribers.

Sparklyren also noted that, even though there are dedicated subreddits to GIF porn specifically, “Other porn subreddits welcome GIFs, and in most cases, GIFs are the top-performing posts on those pages. If that isn't proof of the power of the porn GIF, then I don't know what is.”

Another interesting phenomenon to come out of the porn GIF's legacy (that will likely define its future) is how the snippet porn style not only jumped onto Twitter, but also intersected with OnlyFans. OnlyFans is a platform where subscribers pay sex workers and (some of who began as regular influencers) money directly for their adult content.

“Porn stars are actually starting to post their own homemade GIFs as well, so it’s an excellent tool for self-promotion,” said 88Remmer. That’s part of the reason he always makes sure to credit and link out to the full video source he pulled his GIFs from when posting them on Reddit.

Sparklyren doesn’t love OnlyFans itself as a platform precisely because it’s hard to organically find and discover fetishes or performers that will fit your tastes. But he commends performers like Reno Gold, who understand the importance of doing self-promotion on other platforms in conjunction with OnlyFans, fixing the lack of discoverability by utilizing the porn GIF format.

“He knows exactly which 10-second portion of his OnlyFans scenes to upload to Twitter in order to get consumers to subscribe. That is not easy,” he praised.

In general, community remains at the hearts of what makes the porn GIF such a singular, long-lasting genre of adult entertainment — no matter where it ultimately lives.

“The porn GIF is not going away any time soon, because porn communities are a great thing that I hope continue to thrive and allow more people to be liberal and not feel judged about something that we all enjoy,” said the Digital Pimp.

The precise science of the perfect porn GIF

Within the porn GIF genre, there are a variety of subgenres, which speaks to just how much creators influence and shape porn GIFs through craftsmanship.

According to 88Remmer, there's the style that's essentially a minute-long summary of videos, cutting together different positions before landing on the money shot. The other common style, which he prefers, scrubs through porn videos to find the single best moment, which they then work to turn into the perfect GIF.

“I like to think of it as ‘One Hot Minute,’ like the Red Hot Chili Peppers album,” he said. "Even in a mediocre scene, there is always at least one minute when it all comes together: the chemistry between the actors, lighting, proper cam positioning. That's what a good GIF captures,” he said. Also, “I noticed that the best one-minute edits often feel longer than a minute. That’s all about finding the one hot minute and augmenting it with editing tricks like cropping or scene cutting, making it quick and consumable by emphasizing the hottest parts.”

For the Footprince, the best porn GIF has three requirements: good color/lighting, smooth as butter frame rate, and replay value with a hypnotic effect.

“The perfect loop is still being discussed to this very day,” he said. But part of the creativity of being a porn GIF maker is working within the very restrictive limits of file size allowances across each platform. Twitter has one of the bigger ones, allowing for 15mb. But the Footprince believes the 5-6mb range is better for the sake of quicker uploads on the consumer's side.

“My rule of thumb is the three seconds of gold,” he said. “If I find something very dope, I try to cut it down to 3 seconds and go from there. if it's longer, I can edit in workarounds to make the file smaller.”

Despite the loss of Tumblr, the porn GIF is still only growing more popular according to our sources. The Footprince believes this is in part due to the “boon of tools available to make GIFs today.” Before, you needed at least some basic video editing capabilities. But now, through mobile apps like Inshot, Gifmaker Editor, and Video Collage, “My phone is more powerful than my computer at making GIFs, which blows my mind.”

He believes that “we have yet to see the peak of creativity behind the creation of porn GIFs,” and hopes even more interesting things will be done with all the new software possibilities.

For Sparklyren, the power of the porn GIF speaks for itself after surviving so many years and so much restriction and censorship from various platforms.

“What I find so incredible is the porn GIF's permeability. It has infiltrated absolutely every medium that allows it. If a social media site allows porn and allows GIFs, you'll certainly find a huge porn GIF community on that platform. That’s a testament to the format's popularity,” he said. “The porn GIF will absolutely continue to thrive!"