Better late than never: Twitter has finally added the option to insert animated GIFs in your tweets. The use of this format began to get popular again several years ago, above all thanks to networks like Tumblr, and there are many tools to create your own animated loops based on your videos or fragments extracted from others.
There are a few things to note about this new addition. Luckily, the animations won’t run automatically in your timeline, and as in the case of Vine videos, you’ll have to click on the image to make it start playing.
Animated GIFs have just arrived to Twitter! This is gonna be awesome! pic.twitter.com/eZns6Uxaq9
— Uptodown (@uptodown_en) June 20, 2014
With regards to its rollout, at the moment you can only add GIFs from the official desktop client and some users might have problems viewing them correctly. Soon, though, an update will come out for mobile versions, and access will also be extended to third-party clients like Tweetdeck.
How do I make my own animated GIFs?
The easiest way to capture a fragment of a video downloaded locally is using the Free Video to GIF Converter, a free tool for Windows that lets you set the segment start and end points and select the output quality for the GIF file. In five minutes you’ll have your own ready-to-use animation.
Another, much more practical alternative is to do these animations based on the videos you have on your smartphone so you don’t have to depend on a desktop computer. Cinemagram is a free app for Android and iOS that does just that: it makes animations based on videos stored on your device and applies various filters and effects to the final result.
