Why You Should Be Using GIF Profile Pictures

Gifs: Whether you pronounce it JIF or GIF, we all know and love them. Animated pictures simply catch the eye more than still images, and fortunately do not take up as much storage as video files do. If you have been on Tik Tok or Twitter recently, you may have noticed people are starting to use gifs as their profile pictures instead of normal images.

This new trend in social media is fairly new and is not used by a lot of people right now, which is all the more reason for you to try this out on your own profiles. Fortunately, a lot of the big social media platforms already have the option for you to set a GIF as your profile picture! 

In this article, you’ll review a few examples of people using GIFs as their profile images, such as this investment firm. Following that, we will go over how you can create a GIF and upload it as your profile picture for various social media sites.

Prominent Examples of GIF Profile Pictures

If you aren’t convinced already that GIFs are the future, then we highly recommend looking at these examples:

  • Cartoon Styled Profile GIFs

If you have a social media profile that is for a virtual account of yours, then you may already be familiar with having a cartoon-like image for your profile picture. If you want to step up your game, then consider uploading a GIF to your profile picture instead!

There are a ton of examples of profile pictures like this, such as this simple cartoon character GIF profile picture

  • Custom Gif Profile Pictures

For your personal social media account, you’re probably going to have a hard time finding GIFs of yourself if you haven’t already made some. Fortunately, it isn’t a hard process and tons of people have done it!

For example, check out this article on Facebook’s GIF profile pictures. 

How To Create Your Own GIF Profile Picture

Now that you’ve seen how GIFs are currently being used for profile pictures, it is time to create a GIF of your own for your profile. To do this, you’ll need a video you wish to loop into a GIF. We recommend a short video, so that it stands the best chance of being able to be uploaded to most social media sites.

For example, Discord allows their users to have GIFs last up to 15 seconds for profile pictures, which is around 100MB of storage. However, this guide says that anything longer than a few seconds would load very poorly. Facebook, on the other hand, will let you have a GIF up to 7 seconds, provided the file size is not too large, of course.

So, to create your own GIF, all you need to do is decide on the video you wish to use, then use an online mp4 to GIF converter. Our personal recommendation is ezgif’s video to gif converter, as it has many customizable options with little to no advertisements interfering with you. 

To use the website, simply upload the video from your phone or computer, and then click ‘upload video’. Following that, you will be directed to a page where you can edit all sorts of features of your GIF to ensure it complies with the site you want to upload it to. Once you are happy with the settings, you can click ‘convert to gif’ and the process of converting your video file to a GIF file will begin. Once it is completed, you can download the file and begin using it as your profile picture!

Key Takeaways

Hopefully you now have all you need to know in order to set your profile picture as a GIF. It is truly a great method of adding some more personality and depth to your social media accounts, and we cannot wait for more social media platforms to join in on the trend and allow for GIFs to be set as profile pictures. 

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