How to add multiple GIFs to a tweet on Twitter
If you’re an active Twitter user, you might have noticed users sending Tweets with multiple GIFs in them. If you were to try and do it yourself though, you’d be met with Twitter’s one-GIF-per-Tweet limitation. Some users seem to think that this is a new feature that only iOS users have but that’s not the case. Anyone, regardless of what platform they’re using Twitter on, can add multiple GIFs to a tweet at once. There’s a small trick to it.
Animated PNGs
Animated PNGs or APNGs are a file format that is based on PNG but supports animation. The ‘GIFs’ that you’re seeing are actually APNGs that iOS users are inexplicably using because iOS can natively turn live photos into GIFs. It seems that those GIFs are what’s doing the magic.
So, in a nutshell, you need to take your GIFs and convert them to APNGs. To do that, you can use a free online tool called Animated PNG maker.
Select the GIF you want to convert, and click the Upload button. Once the GIF has been uploaded, the app will break the frames down for you. Change nothing.
Scroll further down and click Make APNG.
Wait a few minutes because conversion takes time. When the converted image appears, right-click it and save it. The image will save with the PNG file extension.
Open Twitter, and compose a new tweet. Tap the image button and select the PNGs that you created. You can attach up to four, and send the tweet.
https://twitter.com/FatiWahab/status/1207058631352553473
That should do the job.
APNG Maker works fine on a mobile device so you really do not need to own an iOS device to be able to add multiple GIFs in a tweet. Most tweets appear to have only two GIFs but you can go as high as four since that’s the number of images Twitter allows in a tweet.
We will say this though; your GIF’s quality may or may not suffer during conversion. It depends on the original GIF. APNG shouldn’t degrade it too much but it is being converted to another format so there may be some loss in quality.
This isn’t a new Twitter feature. It’s more accurate to describe it as a loophole, an awesome loophole. Twitter may, or may not have been aware of it but let’s hope the company does not limit APNG files the way it does GIFs. Better yet, maybe it should consider allowing users to tweet multiple GIFs without having to convert them in the first place. It’s already allowed GIFs in quoted tweets.
