How to Share Gifs to Instagram

The internet is obsessed with gifs. Cat gifs, gifs from TV shows, movies, celebrities making odd faces and more that people now use to post as small animations on the web to further get across the more specific emotion they are feeling (nothing says good job like that Drake gif of him clapping. That’s just correct).

And while everyone shares these on a variety of social networks, there’s one that won’t accept them: Instagram. Instead if you try to upload a gif to Instagram, you simply get the first frame/image of the gif and, let’s be real Drake just sitting there in a chair; not as effective.

So it begs the question, how do you share a gif to Instagram?

Find & Share a Gif to Instagram Using Giphy

Now, the easiest way to do this would be to find the gif you need and then share it directly to Instagram through the ever-popular Giphy app.

With the Giphy app, you can easily search for whatever it might be you’d like to say using a gif instead of boring ol’ words.

Once you find the one you love, you can then just tap it then tap the Instagram icon under the photo (you need to tap the three dot icon, then Instagram on Android) and it’ll begin converting it to a video –since Instagram, unlike the entire rest of the internet, apparently hates gifs.

Eventually it’ll finish converting the gif to a video and automatically prompt you to share it to Instagram.

You can then do your normal Instagram changes (filters, captions, etc.) and tap Share to send it off to your totally unsuspecting Instagram followers.

Already Have a Gif You Want to Share?

If, on the other hand, you have a gif you want to share that maybe you already have or you can’t find in Giphy, we can still send it to Instagram, but we’ll need to convert it to a video manually first.

To do that, save the gif to your phone in whatever way you can (i.e. if it’s from a Google search, tap and hold on the image and save it to the phone, if it’s on your computer perhaps email it to yourself and download it or plug in the phone via USB and copy it over).

Once on the phone, we can then use another app to convert them to a video before sharing to Instagram. For iOS, Gif Maker for Instagram is super popular and works well and, for Android, Gif to Video is popular on that platform. Download whichever you need (or search the app stores for “Gif to Video” for a bunch of others.

Open the app and open the gif you downloaded earlier.

 

 

Tap convert to video and wait for it to do its thing.

Once done, the new video should saved in your photo gallery. You can select it and tap share (like normal) and select Instagram and you know the drill from there.

 

And there we go! Sharing gifs to Instagram (well, converting them to a video and then sharing that, technically, but you get the idea). Hope that helps anyone who’s been struggling to express themselves appropriately on Instagram. Let me know if that helped you in the comments below or if you have another way that might be easier.

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