As the average global Internet speeds are increasing, the most popular social networks on the planet are doing their best to introduce new features that are using them to their full capacity. In that regard, the latest change Twitter introduced isn’t revolutionary, but it sure is convenient. Namely, the popular microblogging platform has raised its GIF size limit to 15 megabytes, up from 5 it’s been supporting since 2014. So, two years after Twitter originally gave its users the option of uploading, viewing, and sharing animated GIFs, it now received support for unnecessarily large ones.
Alright, “unnecessarily large” may be an overstatement, but the fact remains that 15MB is quite a lot for this media format, especially considering the fact that online services have improved GIF compression over the years. So, unless you’re making your own super large GIFs, this change probably won’t momentarily affect your Twitter user experience given how most existing GIF services only support files that are up to 5MB in size. Another thing that even further lowers the chances you’ll notice any change with this GIF size limit increase is the fact that it currently only applies to the browser version of Twitter. Needless to say, most users are microblogging from their smartphones and tablets, i.e. mobile apps whose GIF size limit still stands at 5MB. The company has currently made no announcements in regards to when the mobile limit will be raised. So, although this change probably won’t have an immediate impact on the Twitter user experience, it’s likely we’ll start seeing more high-quality and super long GIFs on the popular social network in the near future.
In related news, Twitter has recently partnered with GIPHY and Riffsy, two popular GIF services whose gigantic databases of animated memes and reactions are now integrated into the popular microblogging platform. As mobile connectivity speeds are getting better, there’s no doubt we’ll see even more high-resolution animated media shared on social networks in the future and it’s almost certain that Twitter will do everything it can to make sharing and watching GIFs on its platform even easier. The latest step in that endeavor was the dedicated GIF button Twitter started rolling out to users in February.