The present article it's a proposal to analyze a visual trend, the GIF. It began to take force from the year 2012 all over the internet platform Tumblr. Throughout the article its established a possible origin of the various principles of the GIF. This is achieved by artifacts such as zoetrope and thaumatrope. These were and remain as small games that worked by manual movement. With the advent of the internet these manual mechanisms were digitalized. The GIF is a visual format where movement is cyclical. This happens in a similar way with the mentioned artifacts. The content of the GIF is very broad, therefore, I have resorted to a series of three classifications for this format.