Instagram’s new app Boomerang lets you capture and post one-second video loops

Instagram posts looking slightly stale? That might be because you haven’t yet jumped on the GIF trend.

In response to the craze for animated pictures, the social network has just announced it's releasing a standalone app, Boomerang, which takes a series of pictures in a burst and then stitches them together into a looping video that plays forward and back.

Working in a similar way to competitor app Phhhoto, the new app lets you create what Instagram is appropriately calling a “boomerang,” by taking short-burst videos and playing them in a sort of self-rewinding clip.

Users open the app and press a button, initiating the burst that will be automatically pieced together by Instagram.

Capture the exact moment your friend blows out his birthday candles, then watch them come back to life again and again, or shoot a backwards selfie with your friends.

The short videos can then be directly shared to your feed, or saved to the phone's camera roll to be shared via other apps.

"Press a button and the app does the rest," Instagram wrote in its blogpost announcing the new app. "Boomerang takes a burst of photos and stitches them together into a high-quality mini video that plays forward and backward. Shoot in portrait or landscape. Share it on Instagram. Boomerang automatically saves it to your camera roll."

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Instagram launch app offshoots. Last year, it launched Hyperlapse — a video editing app which allows its users to condense a long video into a short, sped-up edit — and Layout, which puts users pictures into a collage.

Moving selfies: coming soon to a smartphone near you.

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