Twitter now allows users to upload higher-quality GIFs on its platform, but only on the web. The company has quietly updated its documentation to reflect that animated GIFs of up to 15MB are now supported. However, the 5MB limit remains for GIFs posted from Twitter’s mobile apps.
While you can only upload larger GIFs through Twitter.com, it’s possible this feature will arrive on the company’s mobile apps in future. That will likely depend on how well Twitter’s infrastructure can handle the 15MB GIFs and will have to take into consideration how they would impact users’ data plans on mobile devices.
Sadly, there’s no word about when GIF support will arrive for TweetDeck.
Twitter added GIF support in 2014, and a GIF button arrived on its apps in February, thanks to a partnership with Giphy and Riffsy. This update allows the actual image to appear in-tweet, instead of forcing you to a website to view the image.
ALERT: Twitter now supports gifs up to 15MB! pic.twitter.com/PfyAiYRg5K
— Jessica L. Conditt (@JessConditt) July 11, 2016
We reached out to Twitter for additional comment and will update if we hear back.
Update as of 10:08 a.m. Pacific on Tuesday: Amended this post to clarify that GIF support has been on Twitter since 2014. Additionally, the company has acknowledge the change with an appropriate response:
Hooray, you can now Tweet GIFs up to 15MB in size from https://t.co/zDdcbPNfnU! https://t.co/OGxWpvy1ZG pic.twitter.com/MbxPGStsJU
— Twitter Support (@Support) July 12, 2016
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings.