Facebook adds gif support, letting animated images play in news feed

Users can’t upload gifs to Facebook, but ones from elsewhere will finally show in their full, moving glory

Andrew Griffin
Saturday 30 May 2015 05:55 BST
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Gifs will now properly display on Facebook, finally letting users see the moving pictures in their news feed.

Users can’t upload moving gifs to the site. But if they paste a link to one stored elsewhere — such as on Imgur — it will now show up properly as a repeating, animated picture.

Facebook is just one of the many social media companies that seem to have struggled with getting the beloved moving pictures onto their news feeds. Twitter transforms gifs into videos to show them on the site — and a similar method proposed by Giphy has been the easiest way of getting them onto Facebook.

But the image type is now properly supported in the news feed. That includes posting in comments.

All users have to do is post a link, which will be pulled through and then rendered in the same way that Facebook has long done for other images.

Examples are being busily shared on a group set up for fans of animated gifs, The Next Web notes.

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