GIFs on Facebook: Giphy makes sharing GIFs to your Timeline a reality (sort of)

Jason Gilbert

Your Facebook Timeline is about to get a lot more animated.

Giphy, the awesome GIF archiving-and-search site, has now made it so that you can play your GIFs on Facebook -- with a catch. Any GIF you embed from Giphy.com will not come with a little play button: Click play and the GIF goes into perpetual motion. The next frontier, of course, would be to embed a GIF that just automatically plays; for now, though, you can satisfy yourself on your Timeline and in the comments with these playable GIFs from Giphy.

(That's a screen recording of my Facebook feed above, with GIFs. It works!)

You can read more about the announcement at Giphy's blog here; and if you want to start sharing your own GIFs on Facebook, head to Giphy to find your favorites, and then just share the link of your GIF in the text box on Facebook to get the GIF player you see below.



UPDATE: A Facebook spokesperson has contacted us to declare definitively that "Facebook does not support animated GIFs." And, the spokesperson is correct: Facebook doesn't support GIFs; Giphy's solution is very much a workaround to that non-support, converting the GIF file into a file that is supported by Facebook.