UPDATED 10:04 EDT / JUNE 26 2015

NEWS

Tumblr TV is a gif search engine that is as terrible as it sounds

If there is one thing Tumblr is known for, aside from teenagers pretending to be dragons or fairies, it is low quality gifs and lots of them. Now, the blogging and image sharing site is making it easy to find and watch all of your favorite terrible Tumblr gifs with a new search platform called Tumblr TV.

The search page is basically a non-stop slideshow of gifs that you can also pause and…not much else.

Here’s what Tumblr said about Tumblr TV:

Turn on TUMBLR TV and make your computer screen perfect forever.

How? Browse over to tumblr.com/tv. Never touch your computer again, because now it’s perfect forever. Or search for something and watch TUMBLR TV of whatever that something is. You’ll figure it out.

Why? This is the ’90s, baby! Anything goes!

Ugh.

Tumblr TV does not require a Tumblr account to use, though it is unclear exactly what any non-Tumblr users would want with the tool.

Why are Tumblr gifs so awful?

You may have noticed that most Tumblr gifs are little more than two or three low resolution frames looping endlessly. That is why most have text on them—there is no way you can tell what is happening otherwise.

The reason for this is Tumblr’s tiny 2MB file size restriction, which means that all of the gifs that are uploaded are low resolution and have very few animated frames. Meanwhile, popular image sharing site Imgur.com has a basic limit of 5MB, and pro members can upload images up to 10MB in size.

So to compare, this is what an average Tumblr gif looks like:

http://movies-quotes.com/post/105550568201

And this is what a non-Tumblr gif can look like:

The High Quality Gif

While sites like Reddit and Tumblr have popularized gifs as a type of internet shorthand, other companies are getting in on the action as well.

In May, social media giant Facebook added native gif support to its platform, allowing users to share gifs from the web the same way they do with pictures and video. Microblogging service Twitter also added gif support to Tweets a little over a year ago.

Screenshot via Tumblr

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