YouTube now has a GIF creator, and if there's one thing my mama taught me, it's never look a GIF horse in the mouth. (She loves puns, what can I say?)

Using the new tool on the Google-owned video site, you can grab a portion of the video you're watching and turn it into a looping silent mini-clip saved as a Graphics Interchange Format file, also known as a GIF (or " jiff", if you're the guy who invented the format back in 1987).

To use the GIF creator, sign in to YouTube, find a video and click the Share option. Next to the familiar embed and email options you should also see GIF. You're shown sliders that you move through the video to choose the clip you want to loop, and if you want you can add your own text at the top and bottom.

The results can then be embedded just like a full video -- as I've done above -- or emailed, or shared on social networks including Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

Spotted by blogger and former Kickstarter CTO Andy Baio, the built-in feature could replace websites that create GIFs from YouTube videos, although not just yet: the tool isn't enabled on every YouTube video, sadly. It works on PBS Idea Channel videos, and we also spotted it on the Epic Rap Battle between Ghostbusters and Mythbusters.