Animated GIFs are the best part of the Internet. If you are fun and cool, you probably agree. It’s astonishing how much story you can convey with only a few frames of video repeating ad infinitum and maybe a caption. That’s why there are so many blogs dedicated to them. But the worst is when a GIF goes by too quickly, something happens in that very last frame before it loops back to the beginning, and you just can’t quite make out exactly what’s going on. If you’ve ever wanted to slow down your favourite GIFs so you could soak them in frame-by-pixelated-frame, there’s a new web tool that lets you do just that.

GIF CTRL lets you control GIFs using your mouse or keyboard. You can speed them up, slow them down, or scrub them back and forth. It’s very simple and very empowering. The site is populated with amusing preloaded GIFs of Emma Stone, Drake, and various people exhaling smoke, but you can easily upload your own GIFs and start watching them on your own terms. This must be how people felt when they introduced the pause button on the VCR.

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Michael Kolberg is The Sprawl Editor at Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter for jokes @mikeykolberg

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