Twitter Increases GIF Size Limit To 15MB, But Only For The Web
Now Twitter permits users to upload higher quality GIFs on its platform, but simply on the web meaning user's still restricted to puny GIFs on mobile for the time being. Moreover, the change does not apply to Twitter clients, such as Hootsuite or Tweet Deck. The high-quality GIF party is therefore currently the domain of Twitter’s flagship platform. The company has updated its documentation to reveal that animated GIFs of up to 15MB are now supported. However, its 5MB limit remains for those posting from its mobile apps.
In 2014, Twitter added GIF support but native GIF support arrived on Twitter in February thanks to a partnership with Riffsy and Giphy. In doing so, the real image seemed in-tweet instead of forcing you to a website to view the image.
“So much can be expressed with GIFs, and the key is to find just the right one in the moment that quickly and efficiently expresses your emotions,” said CEO and co-founder of Riffsy, David McIntosh.
Social networking websites appear to have realized the importance of these gif images, those embeddable moving pictures that are commonly used as reaction posts or memes. Gif images are used to share very short-duration video clips and have been carried into the mainstream by websites such as 9Gag. The primary benefit gif images have over videos is that they permit the user to make and share animations with much more simplicity, and in most cases are lesser in weight.
Even though these might not appear like big advantages, gif images have shown to be game-changers with most users watching the content on their mobiles and more essentially, on a data connection at most times.
Twitter started supporting videos up to 140 seconds long, In June.
As noted, pictures are still limited to 5MB, and gif size is still restricted to 5MB when using Twitter's mobile apps. Recently Twitter has also improved the length of Vine videos from 30 seconds to 130 seconds and is developing an update where @names and media attachments will no longer count towards the 140 character Tweet limit.