About GIFs Galore Bot

a bot by taizou
Twitter: @gifs_bot
Mastodon/Fediverse: @gifsbot@botsin.space
Bluesky: @gifs-bot.bsky.social

Where do these images come from?

They were sourced from the 1992 "GIFs Galore" CD by Walnut Creek, downloadable from the Internet Archive. Walnut Creek most likely gathered them from BBSs, judging from the credits found on some of the images.

Can you credit the creators?

The original CD provided no info on authorship other than any signatures or credits found on the image itself, so unfortunately I have no additional credits to provide. Copyright on these images was basically ignored - they would be traded around on different BBSs, Usenet, floppy disks and CD-ROMs as just 'cool things to look at on your computer'. Some are original artwork, while some were scanned or digitised from other sources, such as magazines, movies or TV.

However- if you are (or represent) the creator of one of these images, and would like to either be credited or for the image to be removed from the set, please let me know via Twitter DM or email and I'll do so.

Have they been modified from the originals at all?

A couple of changes are automatically made to each image before posting, to accommodate both the specific quirks of the social media sites used and the nature of image rendering on modern devices.

  1. The image is double in size using nearest-neighbour (e.g. pixel-perfect) scaling, to better represent the original pixel detail. Images displayed on social media are typically scaled using interpolation to suit the size of their container, which would result in a blurry mess if the images were kept at 1:1 size.
  2. The image is then converted to 8-bit PNG. This ensures Twitter will post it as-is and not convert it to JPEG, which would produce visible compression artifacts and degrade the quality of the original.

Bluesky appears to always convert images to JPEG and scale them to 2000px regardless of their original format. For that platform I 4x rather than 2x scale the input images, which mitigates the quality loss for the most part, but I'm still not entirely happy with the results. There doesn't seem to be any way around it for the time being though.

Aren't GIFs supposed to be animated?

Not necessarily! GIF was a common format for still images for a long time. JPEG and PNG have long since superseded it for this purpose, but GIF remains in use for its animation functionality, which the other common formats lack; hence "GIF" now becoming synonymous with "animation".

Okay, but are any of these GIFs animated?

Not in the bot's current set. The CD does contain a few animated GIFs, but they've been held back for now as they'd need some manual processing to not look dumb on Twitter.

What does this bot run on?

A custom deal that powers all my bots, written in PHP. It's not open source yet, but hopefully will be eventually.

Is this vaporwave?

I don't know what you're talking about