Twitter users who are fans of GIF images will surely rejoice at the latest announcement from the microblogging site.
According to the Twitter Help Center, the maximum size for GIFs allowed on the site has been increased to 15MB. It was previously 5MB but that had become prohibitively small, writes Valentina Palladino for Arstechnica.
Twitter makes low key limit change
Despite the move being good news for Twitter users, the company didn’t make a big deal of the change. It didn’t mention the development on social media, nor did it make a big media announcement.
In fact the only news of the change came on the Help Center page related to image, video and GIF-posting regulations. “Photos can be up to 5MB; animated GIFs can be up to 5MB on mobile, and up to 15MB on web,” the page states.
As a result you will only be able to post 15MB GIFs from your computer. Users that are posting from a smartphone will still only be able post GIFs up to 5MB in size.
New looser limits for GIFS, posts and Vine videos
It might not sound like much space, but the new limit represents a three-fold increase over the previous 5MB. Twitter users have been cramming music videos, TV shows and even The Matrix movie into single tweets, just to show what can be achieved thanks to a seemingly small improvement.
There has been no announcement as of yet on whether external applications such as TweetDeck will support the new GIF limit. However they are usually slightly behind the times when it comes to Twitter updates.
Many users were attracted to Twitter by its in-built limits, but the company has demonstrated a willingness to become more flexible. It recently stopped counting images, usernames and polls in the 140-character limit for each post. It also increased the video length limit of quick-video platform Vine from 6 seconds to 140 seconds.
There is still some debate as to whether Twitter can be called a social network, and the company has gone through some rough periods as it tries to turn high user numbers into advertising revenue. However that has not stopped rumors that Alphabet may be considering a bid for Twitter in the future.
