Over the past week, we have seen a very interesting trend on Twitter. People and brands alike have been posting tweets that contain multiple animated photos.
The key was that these photos were in the APNG format and not the usual GIF format that you are used to. You cannot add more than one GIF on a tweet and that is why APNGs were so much fun to begin with.
This one by Brooklyn 99
Nailed it. pic.twitter.com/XAMn8aUPH3
— Brooklyn Nine-Nine (@brooklyn99) December 19, 2019
This iconic moment
https://twitter.com/cyborpunks/status/1206665527311175683
This weird one
please work pic.twitter.com/VUSUxDohl4
— Coda (@codaanim) December 15, 2019
Perfection
— WFL updates (@rihannalately) December 15, 2019
Well now apparently Twitter is cracking down on this trend where they claim that using these APNGs is a bug.
“We recently found a bug that lets you add multiple animated images to a Tweet using Animated PNG files,” Twitter said. “APNGs ignore our safeguars and can cause performance issues for the app and your device. Today we’re fixing the bug which will no longer allow APNGs to animate when Tweeted.”
The most interesting bit about the APNGs is that you could view them on the iOS app and on the web. It did not work well on Android for some reason, so it seems from now on, we will not be able to see these multiple animated photos.
For a brief moment, Twitter was turned into Tumblr. Tumblr has allowed multiple GIF uploads to a single posts for years now and it can be really cool. Thanks to this ‘bug’, we have seen how people and brands on Twitter became quite creative and came up with cool animated posts that used these APNGs.
Well, playtime is over folks. We are back to single GIF upload per tweet it seems.
