Twitter now supports GIFs up to 15MB

This one’s for GIF lovers. Twitter has expanded its animated GIF size limit to 15MB from 5MB opening up all kinds of new possibilities for those who prefer GIFs to plain text. Prior to the change, Twitter's size ceiling for both photos and animated GIFs was 5MB.

ALERT: Twitter now supports gifs up to 15MB! pic.twitter.com/PfyAiYRg5K

— Jessica L. Conditt (@JessConditt) July 11, 2016

The new feature however, is available only for the web users, 5MB limit remains for those posting from the mobile apps. The company has updated its documentation to reflect that animated GIFs of up to 15MB are now supported. Unfortunately, the update hasn't made its way to TweetDeck, which remains perennially behind the times when it comes to Twitter engineering improvements.

Twitter added GIF support in 2014, but native GIF support arrived on Twitter in February thanks to a partnership with Giphy and Riffsy. In doing so, the actual image appeared in-tweet instead of forcing you to a website to view the image.

As to why anyone would really need to post a 15MB GIF 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 it's 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.