Twitter now supports unnecessarily large GIFs

Twitter has expanded its animated GIF size limit from 5MB to 15MB, opening up all kinds of new possibilities for situations when plain text just doesn’t cut it. Prior to the change, Twitter’s size ceiling for both photos and animated GIFs was 5MB. The photo limit has stayed the same, along with the GIF limit for mobile uploads. But Twitter now allows for GIFs three times the size if they are uploaded on the web. Unfortunately, the update hasn’t made its way to TweetDeck, which remains perennially behind the times when it comes to Twitter engineering improvements.

The new limit was spotted by careful Twitter Support watchers and avid GIF users, including Marvel Digital Media VP Ryan Penagos. Indeed, an update to Twitter’s photo FAQ outlines the new size limits. As to why anyone would really need to post a 15MB GIF, that remains unclear. But the change would appear to follow the company’s more recent trend of removing logistical barriers to posting media on its various platforms. As of last month, Twitter-owned Vine now supports 140-second video uploads, up from its well-known and constrained 6-second limit. Starting last year, the company also began increasing the length limit for in-stream videos, which now matches Vine at 140 seconds.