Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

Twitter opens the high-quality GIF floodgates with new expanded size limit

Saqib Shah
By

twitter
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Twitter is continuing its trend of increasing the size limit for media uploads on its platforms, with its latest update concerning GIFs.

A number of experienced Twitter users who boast a strong GIF game have spotted the change, which allows you to upload animated GIF files of up to 15MB. The previous size limit for both photos and GIFs on Twitter was just 5MB, although there has been no change to the former.

Recommended Videos

There are some glaring restrictions in line with the update at present. The increased GIF size only applies to Twitter for the web, meaning you’re still restricted to puny GIFs on mobile for the time being. Additionally, the change does not apply to Twitter clients, such as TweetDeck or Hootsuite. The high-quality GIF party is therefore currently the domain of Twitter’s flagship platform.

Related

Among the keen-eyed Twitter users who tweeted about the update (using a carefully selected, wholly appropriate, GIF) were Marvel’s VP of digital media, Ryan Penagos; and ex-Twitter engineering manager Ian Chan, who shared a glorious GIF of The Matrix in its entirety.

Twitter increased gif upload limit. Now I can finally share the entire Matrix movie in a tweet! (cc @KingJames) pic.twitter.com/xpxNvm835b

— Ian Chan (@chanian) July 12, 2016

This is exactly the type of mayhem that will now ensue, as everyone on Twitter ditches text to communicate solely through GIFs. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. However, seeing as some prominent social media industry insiders think that text is actually doomed, perhaps it is a lot closer to the truth than many of us are willing to believe.

Twitter itself rolled out the change extremely quietly, although it has been noted in its photo FAQ guidelines, according to The Verge. The platform has made several similar changes in regard to its products. Most recently, it extended the time limit for video uploads on both Twitter and Vine, to 140 seconds.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Saqib Shah
Saqib Shah
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Saqib Shah is a Twitter addict and film fan with an obsessive interest in pop culture trends. In his spare time he can be…
Twitter expands tweet character limit massively
A lot of white Twitter logos against a blue background.

If you often find that 280 characters are too few for you to be able to effectively express yourself on Twitter, then perhaps 4,000 characters will suffice.

Beginning on Wednesday, Twitter now lets you post tweets with a maximum of 4,000 characters, 28.6 times more than the mere 140 characters available when Twitter launched in 2006, and 14.3 times more than the current limit of 280.

Read more
Twitter will soon be a bit less irritating for many people
Twitter logo in white stacked on top of a blue stylized background with the Twitter logo repeating in shades of blue.

With or without Elon Musk at the helm, Twitter can’t seem to decide what it wants to do with its algorithmic timeline, currently branded as “for you,” which shows tweets it thinks you'll like, whether or not you follow the tweeter.

For years it’s been messing about not only with the algorithm but also with the extent to which it forces the timeline on users.

Read more
Thanks to Tapbots’ Ivory app, I’m finally ready to ditch Twitter for good
Profile displayed in Ivory app

Ever since Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, it’s been one chaotic new thing after another. You literally cannot go a day (or a few days or even a week) without some stupid new change to the site — whether it’s about checkmarks for verified or Twitter Blue subscriber accounts, how links to other social networks are banned and then reversed, view counts on Tweets, or something else. I can’t keep up with every little thing that has happened since the beginning of November, and it feels like the spotlight is always on the toxicity of the site in general.

New Twitter alternatives have been popping up recently, but it seems that the most popular one continues to be Mastodon. I originally made a Mastodon account back in 2018 when it first launched, but it never clicked with me back then, and I eventually went back to Twitter. With the Musk mess, I tried going back to Mastodon, but again, it didn’t really click with me — until Tweetbot developer, Tapbots, revealed its next project: Ivory.
The significance of Tapbots and Tweetbot

Read more