Facebookers, rejoice! The day has finally arrived, and the powers that be are finally granting our wishes of communicating with our friends and loved ones through GIFs! From this point onward, your wall will no longer be home to a boring stream of text and static images!
And it’s about time, too. Facebook added a half-assed workaround for posting GIFs two years ago, and back in March of this year the company added GIF support to its mobile messenger app — but bringing this long-awaited feature to the desktop platform opens up a whole new world. Now you finally don’t need to use actual words to communicate, and can instead express your feelings using a series of clips taken from Nick Cage movies (just like you’ve always dreamed of!).
Users will have the option of embedding GIFs in their status updates simply by adding the link to the GIF. This can come in the form of an Imgur link, a Google image search link, or really any other link to a GIF. Presumably the GIFs posted will still be censored and checked in the same way as photos are now, meaning anything too NSFW is probably still off limits.
After you post one, any friends scrolling down your wall will see the word “GIF” with a dotted circle around it over the image you’ve just posted. They can choose to click in the circle to replay the GIFs as many times as their hearts desire. The process is meant to be intuitive and straightforward both for the poster and the viewer.
Unfortunately, you might not have access to it the feature quite yet. As with all new Facebook features that we report on, GIF posting will be rolling out slowly over an indeterminate span of time. As of right now only a select few Facebook users have full GIF capability, but rest assured your time will come! Just hang tight, and before you know it you’ll finally have a legitimate use for all those reaction GIFs you’ve been collecting and categorizing over the past few years.
