# Gif animation? how to submit?



## oh-my-mind (Aug 15, 2016)

Hello!
I have a problem with the animated gif submissions on FA.. My gifs simply don't move after uploading, while others gifs do  Do I submit them wrong? I'm sorry for such a stupid question


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## darien (Aug 16, 2016)

*checking the gifs themselves:*
Are they set to play once, or loop?
Are they set to loop infinitely or x amount of times?

*Do they fit the size constraints? *
If the dimensions are too big it will be automatically converted to a single still jpg. (regardless if it's originally a gif, png, or other supported file type) by the image resizer.  I do not know off the top of my head what the mininum dimensions are for the automatic resizer to kick in are.

back in 2012 you could go back and change the submission file after the initial upload and it would not be butchered by the image resizer as long as it came in under the 10MB max file size limit. I am unsure if this behavior is still the same, it may be worth trying on one of your problem uploads.

*Tip for working with gifs in FA:*
while writing only portions of frames that have changed to the gif to save on file size does in fact work fine, another common optimization is setting unchanged pixels to transparent. This particular optimization will result in truly ugly automatic thumbnails, as it will not use the first frame of your animated gif to generate the thumbnail. and instead one of the subsequent frames, which will likely be heavily marred by a number of transparent pixels.  You will either want to provide your own thumbnail or disable that optimization in whatever software you're using to create/encode the gif if you wish to use the automatic thumbnail.


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## oh-my-mind (Aug 23, 2016)

darien said:


> *checking the gifs themselves:*
> Are they set to play once, or loop?
> Are they set to loop infinitely or x amount of times?
> 
> ...



Thank you so much for this! <3


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## jayhusky (Aug 23, 2016)

In extension to @darien's post, for some reason, GIF's may sometimes not play when viewed in "normal mode", clicking "Full View" somehow gets them to play. (I've noted this issue on some versions of Firefox and Chrome)


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