The main disadvantage of animated GIFs is obviously the fact that they cannot support audio. On top of that, GIFs are pretty inefficient and tend to have lower quality than videos, since a high-quality GIF would take up too much space and load super slow over the internet.

Your GIFs can be as long as you want them to, but you should ideally keep your GIFs under 10 seconds to make sure that they file size doesn’t become too large.

Animated GIFs are a perfect way to share a fun moment, a short instructional sequence or just express an emotion without relying on text or emojis. Since they are, in fact, images, they’re also easier to embed in websites and they can play and loop without any playback controls taking up space on screen and without requiring any input from the user.

Much like a video, animated GIFs essentially consist of several still images (or frames) combined into one file. These images play in sequence over a period of time, creating the illusion of motion. Most commonly, animated GIFs are used to capture a very brief sequence of video and are set to loop over and over rather than stop at the last frame like a video would.