How do you post Gifs?

AnarchoPlayworker@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 46 points –

I guess the title basically says it all. Anyone know how to post gifs, like you would post an image? Can you do that?

More info: I tried just uploading it the way I would upload an image and it somehow didn’t work. I’m not sure why. I’m doing it from my laptop, so it’s not a mobile issue.

Thanks!

48

Gifs are massively space inefficient.

Lemmy converts all images to webps, to save space and bandwidth. It's a very good format for web content.

It can also do animated images, like gifs, but at better quality and smaller file size. Lemmy seems to limit upload file size, not post file size, so sometimes you can get things to work by already converting it to a wepb before uploading, as the file will then start off as small as it can be.

Alternatively, use a media file host like imgur, and grab the url to direct file. Then simply put that in the post url. Other in the thread have mentioned other options.

You can also have stuff in comments. Like this:

To do this you use standard markdown: ![](url to media file)

Host it elsewhere, ideally as an mp4

Oh hm. Okay cool. I’ll have to figure out how to do that. Where for example would you host it?

Ok, I figured this out after a week, use the app Memmy', they upload your images to imagur including GIFs, any way in the app create a new post, doesn't matter where, then insert your gif, it will automatically upload it to imagur.

Once you have the link in the URL section (your uploaded image) copy it and create the post you want, where you want in the Lemmy website, you now have a GIF.

Complicated but it works, example over on c/weirdwheels.

Wait, why not just post it to Imgur myself? Would that work just as well?

You could, but as I don't have an account I can't verify it works, could work fine.

The GIF file format needs to die. I'm glad lemmy doesn't support it out of the box. That shit was designed for animated images with a few frames and nothing more.

I'm seeing a still image. :(

Edit: Testing

Edit 2: On mine I just see the Jerboa logo. :(

It's a video. Or is it a gif with media controls. idk.

I can see it using liftoff, it's Marge and the word testing animated

Yeah I think it's also a matter of which client you're using. Works perfectly on Connect and on the webpage for me.

It seems to convert gifs to webp automatically.

I wonder if you're just hitting the size limits? How big is your gif?

1.5mb. Is that too big?

With one of the latest updates to the Lemmy software the default upload size limit was made 1MB

Your admin might not have realized this, but likely yes - your file is too large. I set the limit to 10MB on my instance. @ruud@lemmy.world - have you set the upload size limit?

In the meantime though you can upload the file somewhere else and just use that.

catbox.moe allows up to 200mb, no account needed. Just copy the link it gives you and paste it as the post URL

Ohh 1MB is too small. I’ll look into that

Just add a line like client_max_body_size 10M; to your nginx.conf under the http header

The GIF file format needs to die. I'm glad lemmy doesn't support it out of the box. That shit was designed for animated images with a few frames and nothing more.