Giphy’s Top 25 Most Popular GIFs of 2016

When it comes to GIFs, we all have our favorites. Some are no-brainers, tapping into universal truths that make them go-tos to express certain emotions. Others are just plain cute. Giphy recently released its list of the year’s most popular GIFs, and some are a bit surprising.

Top honors went to a stop-motion gnome knitting itself, which managed to clock in at 300 million views. It’s a heartwarming little scene that demonstrates the power of kindness.

The next highest-ranked GIF is a white guy blinking, which got 226 million views. This reaction, which was first shared in 2015, exploded this year and became the embodiment of mild, polite disbelief. A Game of Thrones version, courtesy of Littlefinger, also made the top 10.

In third place was a waving pug from DNCE’s Kissing Strangers music video, which scored 215 million views. It’s a nice reminder that we all need a little unbridled cuteness in our lives. Finally, a Fall Out Boy llama doing some serious dance moves came in at number four.

This is one of the oldest gifs on the list, taken from a 1953 educational video called Let’s Be Good Citizens at School. It’s a pretty obvious no-brainer, but a lot of people still love it.

Other popular gifs include a cranky baby from the Lifetime show Little Women LA that has everyone nodding in understanding, a banana flashing its — uh, banana — to prove that it’s hungry, and a sassy female ninja from Star Wars that’s sure to put anyone in a good mood.

Rounding out the top 25 were pop culture icons like Bryan Cranston dropping an F-bomb in Why Him? (#9), Gal Gadot in her Wonder Woman costume dancing (#10), and the ubiquitous think meme from the BBC’s #HoodDocumentary (#17). And of course, football fans loved this GIF of Junior Galette celebrating a touchdown for the Washington Redskins (#20).

For those who want to create their own gifs, there are several tools available for Linux. Peek is a graphical screen recorder that offers support for creating GIFs and other media formats. It is easy to install and works well on Ubuntu. The other option is Byzanz, a command-line tool that is available in the repositories for Ubuntu. However, it requires you to specify all of the parameters for your gif in the terminal.

Another great gif creation tool is QGifer, which has an intuitive user interface and allows you to easily import video files from your computer to create GIFs. It also has a wide range of effects, filters, and optimizations to help you create your perfect gif. It’s an excellent choice for beginners who want to get started with gif creation on Linux. Lastly, there is also a free and open source multimedia framework, called FFmpeg that can be used to convert videos into GIFs. This is a very powerful and flexible tool that can do many different media operations such as encoding, decoding, transcoding, streaming, filtering, multiplexing, and more.