GIFs may be a holdover from the earliest days of the internet, but the ability to easily share little silent, looping, satisfying clips looks to be with us for the long haul. And with Twitter’s announcement today that it will be rolling out an integrated GIF button soon, the Graphics Interchange Format is only getting more entrenched into modern culture.
The new GIF button, which will be added to Twitter’s web and mobile interfaces, allows users to search for GIFs and quickly include them in a tweet. The button will appear right next to the camera and poll buttons.
The GIFs are coming! Get ready to search and send GIFs in Tweets and Direct Messages: https://t.co/uk75stt1zN pic.twitter.com/1dDD1B4CW2
— Twitter (@Twitter) February 17, 2016
Twitter has supported inline GIFs since 2014, but adding them wasn’t exactly straightforward. You had to download the GIF, then reupload it to Twitter instead of just posting a link to a GIF. While that process still works, it wasn’t always obvious that the GIF would animate.
The new button makes it easy to look for GIFs to add to tweets, but relies on Giphy and Riffsy GIF search engines to surface the files you’re looking for. That means you still may have to do some hunting to find the exact “eating popcorn” GIF you’re looking for, but you won’t have to leave Twitter to do it.
The new GIF search feature is rolling out over the coming weeks to apps on iOS and Android, along with Twitter in the browser.
