I’m gonna go ahead and preface this review by saying that I have never been a huge fan of gifs. Nor have I ever been a huge fan of the popular site, imagefap.com. I just thought it would only be fair for me to identify my biases before I proceed.
Let me address my disinterest in gifs first. I just do not understand why you would ever need a porn gif. Especially since it is a fact that if there is a gif of something, then there is a video of it from which the gif was taken. So, why would you deny me the actual video and just show me a 5-second clip from it instead?
It doesn’t make any fucking sense. Are people out there really jacking off to gifs? If so, how? What is the appeal? Am I sounding too much like a crotchety old man yelling at youngsters to get off his lawn? Well, good! You shouldn’t be jerking off on my lawn anyway, whether to gifs or anything else.
My beef with Image Fap probably stems, in part, from my strong preference for porn videos. But that can’t be it entirely … I can appreciate a well-done erotic photograph. Or a pic of a particularly sexy amateur that might not be so easy to find. And ImageFap is surely great for that. No, I think the majority of what I dislike about this site is how sloppily it’s designed and how ad-happy it is.
But Image Fap is not without its merits. They provide a really cool platform for user-uploaded porn and a really great sense of community as well, which I love. With plenty of ways to communicate with fellow users and a forum on which to discuss fantasies, kinks, favorite porn stars, etc., I am willing to give Image Fap the benefit of the doubt and take another look at the site … this time solely at its gifs section.
Sloppy Site Design
So, from the moment I arrive at Image Fap’s gifs page, I feel as disoriented as I have on the other pages of this site. There’s just too much happening at once. My eyes have no fucking clue what to do or where to go. It’s like every pixel on the screen is individually vying for my attention. This becomes even worse when you take into account that everything on the page is a gif, and every single one is playing at once.
That would have to be my first big complaint with this page. There’s just too much going on. The site is so fucking cluttered. One way to partially remedy this (emphasis on the word “partially”) would be to render the gifs thumbnails that only animate when you hover your mouse over them. That would at least cut down on some of the unnecessary chaos going on here. But, again, that would only be the beginning of all the necessary changes Image Fap would have to make in order to make this a pleasant site to visit.
Not the Easiest Site for Browsing
I’m also not crazy about the fact that gifs only appear in individual galleries made by users of the site. In the center of the page, choose between, for example, “Classical History Gets Fucked 1” (which appears to be hardcore porn gifs with completely irrelevant captions of classical history over them for some stupid fucking reason), “A Very Merry XXX-Mas 2018” (which is just some average looking chubby chick next to a Christmas tree), and “Cheating Wife and GF Captions” (pretty self-explanatory).
My point is that there is no sense of organization or order to these galleries or how they appear. You can, however, search by category, but you’re still left to sift through endless user-created galleries from there. I don’t know, there just has to be a better way to present content.
That is not to say that there are no ways to search gifs and narrow them down to your liking. You can, of course, enter keywords and search that way. You can also filter results by size (any size, small, medium, large, huge) and post date (any time, today, this week, this month). To the left of the galleries (which each feature a small sampling of what they contain), you can also narrow your selection by gif category and porn category more broadly (meaning that you will see all the galleries that Image Fap has to offer, whether they contain gifs or images or both).
Voracious Community of Porn Lovers
To the right of each gallery, you can also see the profile image of the user who created it, allowing you to either click into their full profile or quickly send them a message. The user profiles allow you to see all of a user’s galleries, his or her fan base, newsfeed, videos, favorites, groups that he or she is a part of, comments on his or her profile, and blog (if he or she has written any posts).
Plus, the user can list any of their interests, write a brief About Me section, you can see their age, gender, and location, as well as when they were last online. As I briefly touched upon earlier, this is, by far, the best feature of Image Fap as a whole … the social media aspects and the ability to communicate with other users. Now, if only they could clean up their presentation. If so, Image Fap would be a force to reckon with.
Taking all of this into account, let’s look into the quality of the gifs themselves, as well as how the gif viewer functions. Well, as far as quality is concerned, it is going to be pretty hit or miss, as is always the case with sites that primarily focus on user-uploads. It all depends on the person who uploaded it, but it ranges from pretty fucking terrible to really fucking good.
I suppose this is one reason it pays off to take full advantage of the social media “following” components of Image Fap. This way, you can only follow the users who have already proven to upload solid content and ignore the ones who offer grainy gifs, or gifs that don’t really show off anything worth making a gif of in the first place (both of these examples are far more prevalent than you might assume).
Intuitive Gallery Gif Viewing
As far as viewing gifs is concerned: I am pretty fond of Image Fap’s media viewer setup. Once you’ve found a gallery that you are happy with (beware of the fact that there are many galleries with very few gifs and/or images to view; choose wisely), click on the first thumbnail to be brought to a page that lets you view it in its full size (sizes will vary greatly).
The most convenient features of the viewer are that you can easily work your way through the gallery using the arrows on your keyboard. Go back and forth quickly and intuitively. There is also a “close gallery” button above your gif that conveniently brings you back to the exact spot you were in your gif search before you selected a gallery. Plus, feel free to take any gif you find and add it to your own gallery, or comment on anything you see.
If you are looking for a place to browse tons of gifs and you don’t care as much about that quality as you do the ability to peruse tons of gifs of homemade content (a rarity on similar gif sites), then give Image Fap’s gif section a go. It would probably be a great place for an aspiring gif maker to test out his burgeoning craft on a pretty big and actively engaged audience.
Worth a Visit
Although I am not crazy about gifs or Image Fap’s sloppy site design, I can definitely see the appeal (to the site anyway … I am still not sold on the idea of using gifs as fapping material) of having a site with an extremely active and engaged user base to chat with about fantasies and collaborate with on user-generated porno galleries.
Not only do people upload, comment, and interact frequently, users seem to be online pretty frequently too. This definitely sets Image Fap apart from similar sites that try to blend social media capabilities with porn. On the others, it seems like a majority of people create profiles and then quickly forget about them. Image Fap users, however, are voracious and have a seemingly insatiable appetite for porn. You may just find your tribe there.
I’ll pass on their gifs section, though. Even if I was a gif fan, the site is just too messy and chaotic to easily navigate the thousands upon thousands of gifs they have; I don’t like the gallery-oriented presentation, and I could do without the pesky fucking ads that follow you as you scroll down the page. Plus, I think a little bit of quality control could be in order for the moderators of Image Fap.
