Facebook Adds Limited Support for Animated GIF Files
Animated GIF files on Facebook? The social network finally announced support for the file format, but there are restrictions.
Christina Warren ofMashable reported that GIFs will only be animated if they are posted via links, and not uploaded.
Warren added that GIF links from Tumblr did not display properly in preview mode, but worked fine after posting.
She also noted that Facebook support for GIFs was extended to its flagship mobile applications, but not to pages.
Finally, Warren suggested that Facebook users looking to share GIFs from services such as Giphy, Imgur and GFYcat use the full URLs for those GIFs in their posts on the social network, as there were coding issues when using the Flash or HTML5 versions of those images that are created by the services.
Facebook confirmed that it is now supporting GIFs in a statement to TechCrunch:
We’re rolling out support for animated GIFs in News Feed. This is so you can share more fun, expressive things with your friends on Facebook.
