How to Post a GIF on Facebook?

Animated GIFs have long been a staple of the internet, and now Facebook allows users to post GIFs to their News Feeds. Here’s how to post GIFs on Facebook.

Facebook recently announced that it will start supporting the .GIF image format on its website; This means Facebook users can now post GIFs to their Timeline and have them appear in their News Feed.

It seems like a fairly late addition to Facebook’s feature list, but the social network isn’t shy about rolling out new features much later than expected, with the Facebook Messenger app for iPad being a good example.

In any case, if you’re excited about posting GIFs on Facebook, here are some tips on how to do it and about GIF support on Facebook that you’ll want to keep in mind.

How to Post a GIF on Facebook?

Posting a GIF on Facebook is really easy. In fact, it’s as easy as pasting a link to a GIF image in the status update text box and pressing Enter.

However, it is important to note that you cannot directly upload a GIF image to Facebook. Instead, you have to upload it to some kind of third-party image hosting service and then paste the link into the text box.

An image hosting service that I love (and others do) imgur. Click at the top of the screen and you can browse your computer for a GIF you saved or paste a link to a GIF already hosted somewhere on the internet.

Then click it and you will be taken to the GIF image when you’re done. To view the raw image in your browser, simply click on it and from there copy the link in the address bar.

Go to Facebook and paste the link in the status update text box at the top of the homepage and then post it to your Timeline.

Depending on your own settings and those of other users, the GIF may or may not be animated automatically. You may need to click on it to start playing. If that’s the case, you’ve probably disabled autoplay videos in Facebook settings.

To change this, go to the desktop version or mobile app version of Facebook. Change to if you want the GIFs to play automatically. Note that this will also automatically play videos that appear in your News Feed.

Again, Facebook unfortunately does not yet support direct uploading of GIF images, but you can use almost any image hosting service as long as the link you paste to Facebook ends with “.gif”.

Where to Find GIFs

Posting a GIF on Facebook is the easy part. The hard part is actually figuring out the GIFs to send. Fortunately, there are several great resources for finding great GIFs.

One of the resources is Google Search. Just go to images.google.com and type something like “happy gif” and you will get loads of GIFs ready to use. You can even click on it and then select it.

Another great GIF resource is Reddit. There are many subdirectories devoted only to gifs. Of course, /r/gifs the main thing to look at, but /r/reactiongifs it’s also a goldmine for funny and awesome GIFs.

Finally, Gypsy It is another good resource for GIFs and you can search for specific ones from the homepage or start browsing random GIFs you might like. You can even select specific categories to narrow things down.