How to add freely licensed animated GIFs to Facebook and Twitter using Riffsy

Facebook has supported animated images for a while, but what do you do when you can't find the right GIF for your situation? For example, until recently, there was not a single image related to my home state Odisha or anything related to my people or language. Facebook and Twitter users generally depend on third-party GIF animation repositories, such as Riffsy and Giphy, to find and share GIFs. Riffsy gathers a lot of its animated GIFs from user contributions, which means if you can't find the kinds of GIFs you're looking for, you can help increase the diversity of available GIFs by creating and sharing new ones with other Facebook and Twitter users.

Recently I uploaded Odisha-related animated images to use on Facebook, so they are now available in Facebook's GIF search. In this article, I'll provide a quick explanation for how you can share your animated images on Facebook and Twitter using Riffsy from the comfort of a hand-held device. In this article, I won't go into detail about how to create animated GIFs. A search online should turn up tutorials for a variety of ways to create animations, using a range of different tools. For example, you can create simple animations using GIMP.

In the spirit of open source, all the images I have uploaded to Riffsy are either created using my own images and licensed under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license (CC BY-SA 4.0) or created using other freely licensed images. The GIFs I created have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia's sister project and a media repository that includes information about the licensing, attribution, and meta data.

Uploading to Riffsy

First, upload your animations to Riffsy. Once approved in Riffsy, the GIFs will appear in a Facebook animated GIF search. Here are instructions for uploading GIFs to Riffsy from Android and iOS devices.

For Android:

1. Download the Riffsy app from the Google Play Store and then open the app.
2. Click the circular + button at the bottom right.
3. Select Upload GIF.
4. The app will show all the GIFs from your camera roll. Select the GIF you want to upload.
5. Add relevant tags so that others can search and find these GIFs in the library.
6. Click Upload.
7. Check your uploads collection. The GIF will appear there once upload is complete.

For iPhone and iPad:

1. Download the Riffsy app from the App Store and then open the app.
2. Click the + button in the upper right corner.
3. Select Upload from Camera Roll.
4. Select the GIF you want to upload.
5. Add the appropriate tags so that others can find these GIFs in the library.
6. Click Done.
7. Check your Saved folder for the uploaded GIF.

After you upload your animated images, Riffsy can take a few hours to appove them. Adding the most relevant keyword while uploading your images is important, and you can add three tags per GIF. Once the GIFs are uploaded into Riffsy, any user on Facebook and Twitter can click the GIF icon in the messenger or tweet field, respectively, and search using your keywords to find relevant images. When there is more than one GIF uploaded with the same tag, users must scroll a bit to find your GIF. I got a notification of my uploaded images crossing 10 shares on the second day!