As the photographer of said GIF, I do have to side with Jamie. While there are cool GIFs that are uploaded (shameless self appeasement), Jamie is right in saying that the majority of GIFs are regurgitated media through someone. I think you touched on this point very well in your post, Bishop, since you said that this is really an issue in creating content vs. sharing content.
Hell, I even purposefully downsized my GIFs to under 1000 pixels so they wouldn't make the front page (Not that I am that confident in my reputation - I have not made front page before) because I think that it doesn't fit as well and it loads very slowly for users with slower internet. It took nearly 2 minutes for the Adam Delorme GIF to load on my internet connection at home and about 30 seconds at my school's.
There are two steps that I think could help out with this process.
1. A new category for photography: GIFs. Hell, you don't even have to worry about people uploading media to wrong categories to get more views in this case, just have the uploader look at the extension, and if it's a GIF, don't let it be posted in other categories (That being said, this is an idealistic solution. I have no experience coding and am not sure if it would be extremely difficult or easy to implement into the uploader's system.)
2. Secondly, and more importantly, a new "required field" for uploading content. I think it would be incredibly valuable to, for all media uploads or embeds, to create a "Did you create this content?" field. If the user checks "No", then have a secondary field to give credit to the creator (These two fields would be REQUIRED to post) and a third field to link to the creator/source that would be optional.
Another idea that I have that I might consider pitching in the next few days is more prominent of a location for the "Media of the Day". Photo of the Day has it great because the uploader gets their shot on the front page for 24 hours, but video of the day has to be accessed specifically through a link, as does the most popular news. I'll get to that in a few days' time!