The death of Vine was perhaps not entirely unexpected, but it’s sad nevertheless. Luckily, six-second videos are pretty easy to archive for posterity, and all-purpose GIF platform Giphy wants you to do just that.
Update: Now live! The original video with sound can be downloaded via the “source” button on the lower right once you import your Vines.
In a brief post on Medium, Giphy explained that, because of the company’s love of all things looping, it’s making a tool that lets you download and keep your Vines forever, or just keep them alive on Giphy itself.
A Giphy representative told me that one of the engineers had the idea yesterday and threw together this tool “because loop 💙”.
You’ll need a Giphy account, and you’ll be able to convert individual Vines or your entire Vine account catalog.
Now, you may be thinking, “Uh, Vines have sound, GIFs don’t.” We’re on the same page, reader. I asked about this. The video will be saved as a GIF (in addition to any higher-fidelity archival format we don’t know about), and the sound will be saved separately. It’ll only be shareable as a GIF at first, but that could change later. Let’s hope so, because the sound is pretty critical on some.
The tool isn’t live yet, but expect it to appear very soon here. I’ll update this post when it does. Update: And it’s up!