The company said that over the last year, almost 13 billion GIFs were sent through Messenger, which amounts to almost 25,000 each minute. Tap and keep holding on the GIF, till you will see a message Save Image. GIF will then be opened in a new screen, where you can tap on the three dots and then tap on Open. Marking the 30 th anniversary of the GIFĪlso in honor of the GIF’s 30 th anniversary, Facebook revealed some major milestones of using the moving pictures on its social networks. Launch the Facebook app from your iPhone. It seems that users’ embracing of the moving images has essentially made it impossible for Facebook to keep ignoring them. If the result ends up creating too much of a visual headache, the company probably will be less likely to add support to News Feed posts. They certainly add motion to the News Feed, and the company seems to have been concerned about it causing headaches from people posting too many GIFs.Īdding a GIF button to Facebook comments is a way for the company to sort of dip its toe in the water to test the impact of having lots of GIFs.
The social networking giant has seemed very hesitant to support GIFs, as it only added support for them two years ago, and according to TechCrunch, the hesitance was because of the impact GIFs would have on the News Feed. Why Facebook hesitated to support GIFsĪt this time, the GIF button is only available in Facebook comments, but it’s possible that the company will roll it out to News Feed posts eventually. The Graphics Interchange Format (better known by its acronym GIF /df/ JIF or /f/ GHIF) is a bitmap image format that was developed by US-based software. It was somewhat easier to post GIFs in Facebook comments on the desktop browser, but doing so on mobile devices was quite convoluted before the GIF button was added. The button makes it much easier to actually post the fun animations in Facebook comments because users no longer have to post the URL of a GIF that’s hosted by a GIF platform.