GIFs Now on Facebook! Everything You Need to Know Here!

Animated GIFs will start appearing on the Facebook News Feed.

The social media giant told Tech Crunch that it will officially support animated GIFs in its News Feed.

A Facebook spokesperson stated, "We're rolling out support for animated GIFs in News Feed. This is so you can share more fun, expressive things with your friends on Facebook."

The update is currently rolling out so people may find the functionality at different times. In 2013, Facebook introduced support for auto-playing videos, instead of allowing GIFs, saying that the latter would make its New Feed too chaotic. Before, the only way to share GIFs on Facebook was through Giphy, which was actually not officially supported by Facebook. The social media site finally changed its decision and began to launch GIFs for users to enjoy more. The recent update will allow users to share GIFs from any internet site, on Facebook, and not only from one source.

Tech Crunch wrote that Facebook users can try the new feature by pasting a link to the GIF which is hosted on an external website, such as Tumblr, Giphy, Imgur and others, into their status update box. Next, users have to publish for the GIF to start animating on the post. In the meantime, GIFs cannot be directly uploaded to be published on the News Feed. GIFs will auto-play together with the present video auto-play settings on Facebook. Users can also disable auto-play via the settings by tapping or clicking a GIF to have it play.

Tech Crunch added that they tried the steps provided but these do not work at the moment, which can mean that Facebook is still rolling out the GIF feature to personal profiles initially. Facebook might also have restricted the functionality from being used by brands.

Wired.com reported that Facebook users will easily learn how to deal with GIFs. There will be a small "GIF" icon at the center of the image. Users only need to press to start viewing. Sharing GIFs also only requires them to enter a link to the image in their update bar then allowing it to load, similar to any other link. As soon as the image appears, users can hit post for it to appear on the Facebook News Feed.

The new GIF functionality will make Facebook more interactive and fun. Based on another Tech Crunch report, the feature has been introduced on Twitter since June 2014, so it can be another step for Facebook to drive more users.