Meme and GIF your favourite shows with Cooler [App of the Week]

Sometimes the discussion around a TV show can be just as fun as watching the show itself. With that in mind, the Cooler app offers robust tools to let you make GIFs and memes out of your favourite TV shows to share with friends.

What’s neat about Cooler is sometimes minute-long clips of an episode are logged into the app, so you can scrub through playback to decide the specific moment you want to turn into a GIF or meme.  You can search what has already been made by other users or make your own. The latter is particularly fun thorough the “Sync TV” feature, which has Cooler determine what show is playing by listening through your phone, similar to how Shazam works.

For example, I played a YouTube clip of the villainous Negan’s first appearance on AMC’s The Walking Dead. Specifically, I held my phone up to my laptop screen when Negan exits a trailer and gleefully greets captive protagonist Rick Grimes and his friends.

Cooler was not only able to correctly identify the clip from Season 6, Episode 16 — “Last Day on Earth,” but also pinpointed the specific part of the season finale in which it occurs — in this case, around the 53 minute mark. I received similar speedy and accurate results with Sync TV with episodes from other shows, such as Friends or Game of Thrones.

Whether you find someone else’s take (which you can also edit) or make your own entirely, you have the option to save Cooler media to your camera roll or upload directly to social media.

Not everyone is up to date on every episode of a show, though. Don’t worry — if you’re a bit behind on Game of Thrones, Cooler’s got you covered. What’s really neat about the app is you can set just how far you’ve gotten in a given series, such as Game of Thrones’ “Season 4, Episode 5” (titled “First of His Name”).

Now, whenever you search for takes from GoT, any media from episodes past “First of His Name” will be blurred out as result. Pressing and holding the take will “unblock” it to reveal the full clip if you don’t mind potential spoilers.

My only gripe with Cooler is that I wish more series were featured. For me, Breaking Bad and The Sopranos are two particularly glaring omissions, but the app does let you suggest new shows to be added in the future, with new additions promised every week. Nonetheless, what’s currently there is still a very solid collection to have have fun with.

Cooler is available as a free download on iOS, with an Android version coming soon.

Header image was created using the Cooler app.