Twitter introduced GIF support way back in 2014 and it gave us another way to express ourselves using a format that has been use on the Internet for quite a while now. There has always been a limit in the size that you could share on the site and the company has quietly decided to bump the GIF size that can be shared.
When you check out their support article regarding posting photos or GIFs under the FAQ’s, they answered a question about the maximum allowed size for photos and GIFs. For GIFs specifically, it is the usual 5MB on mobile but for web it is higher where you can upload a GIF upto 15MB.
It is welcome since the actual high quality GIFs are usually bigger in size and it was quite frustrating to find a good GIF to use that couldn’t be uploaded thanks to the restriction. You were either forced to use an online GIF compression tool to reduce its size or choose another one altogether.
Although the 15MB size restriction looks sufficient right now, Twitter’s GIF size restriction pales in comparison to other sites like Imgur which has a whopping 200MB limit for GIFs and Reddit’s limit is a respectable 100MB.
GIFs have become quite integral to the Twitter experience and that is why the company has been improving how we attach them on the social network. They introduced a GIF button on both desktop and on the mobile apps as a way to easily search and attach GIFs on your tweet. Due to the fact that they revealed that over 100 million GIFs were shared last year on the platform, they would love to increase the engagement on the platform using this medium.
