How to Post GIFs 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 begin supporting the .GIF image format on its website, which means that Facebook users can now finally post GIFs to their Timeline and have them show up in the News Feed.

It seems like a rather late addition to Facebook’s feature list, but the social network doesn’t shy away from introducing new features way later than expected, with the Facebook Messenger app for iPad being one good example.

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

How to Post GIFs on Facebook

It’s really easy to post GIFs on Facebook. In fact, it’s as easy as pasting in a link to a GIF image into the status update text box and hitting Enter.

However, it’s important to note that you aren’t able to upload a GIF image directly to Facebook. Instead, you have to upload it on a third-party image hosting service of some sort, and then paste the link into the text box.

One image-hosting service that I love (and many others do as well) is Imgur. Click on Upload Images at the top of the screen and you can either browse your computer for a GIF that you have stored, or you can paste in a link of a GIF that’s already hosted on the internet somewhere.

Then click Start Upload and once finished, you’ll be taken to the GIF image. Click on it to view the raw image in your browser and from there, simply copy the link in the address bar.

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

Based your own settings, as well as other users’ settings, the GIF may or may not be animated automatically. You may have to click on it to begin playing it. If that’s the case, then you probably have auto-playing videos disabled on the Facebook settings.

To change this, go to Settings > Videos > Auto-Play Videos on the desktop version of Facebook, or go to Settings > Videos and Photos in the mobile app version. Change Auto-play to On if you want GIFs to play automatically. Be aware that this will also automatically play videos that show up in your News Feed.

Again, Facebook doesn’t yet support direct uploading of GIF images, unfortunately, but you can use pretty much any image hosting service, just as long as the link you paste into Facebook ends with “.gif”.

Where to Find GIFs

Posting GIFs on Facebook is the easy part. The hard part is actually finding GIFs to post. Fortunately, there are a few great resources for finding awesome GIFs.

One resource is Google Search. Just go to images.google.com and type in something like “happy gif” and you’ll get a ton of GIFs available for use. You can even click on Search Tools and then select Type > Animated.

Another great GIF resource is Reddit. There are many subreddits dedicated to only gifs. Of course, /r/gifs is the main one to look at, but /r/reactiongifs is also a gold mine for funny and awesome GIFs.

Lastly, Giphy is another good resource for GIFs, and you can search for specific ones right from the home page, or just start browsing for random GIFs that you might like. You can even choose specific categories for narrowing things down.