HEY! Tumblr! I’m calling you out!
“Tina versus Tumblr GIF Fight” animated GIF by @iamTalkyTina
I am very not happy with Tumblr and their confusing what-needs-to-happen-for-a-GIF-to-move rules. I spent a lot of time yesterday reading on the Internet how to figure out how to get your GIF to still animate on Tumblr. Some say it needs to be less than 1 MB. Some say it needs to be less than 512 KB. They say it needs to be 500 pixels wide only. And 700 pixels long only. So I did all that stuff. I also looked at Tumblr GIF Rules but it basically said the same things and did not result in any success.
Then @mbransons says he got my GIF to work by making it only as big as 250×333 pixels which it pretty small, even for me. Like, I already made it smaller to 500 pixels wide. At some point, there is no point in posting Art if you need a magnifying glass to see it. You can see how big the image is at 250 pixels wide in the samples below. Rather than living with 250, I tried some other options.
This morning I tried keeping it the same size but made the colours not so deep and I actually got an image to successfully post on Tumblr but it only had 2 colours and you could not see a thing, so that was a bad result. I added this little message just now to it didn’t look so boring.
2 glorious colours
Next, I tried saving the image with 4 colours. It was a little bit better than dog barf, but not really because it looks like dog barf. Especially all of that lovingly salvaged and extended-with-the-clone-tool original background. Beautiful dog barf.
So NICE at 4 colours.
Then I found more about how if it has TOO much MAGENTA or if it has TOO much PINK then try changing them with adjustment layers but that makes the colours all wonky and even although there were other more suggestions, I decided that I just don’t have all day for that.
Yeah, that looks good.
Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That!
and so then I made a comic book kind of one but even that did not post successfully to Tumblr at 500 pixels wide.
Redone, without the original background.
so then I decided it was too much of a waste of Art Time to figure out the Tumblr rules so I spent my time making my invitation to meet Tumblr at the top of the stairs to see if we can’t work this out, once and for all. Because it is silly to waste Art Time. I don’t know if Tumblr will meet me at the top of the stairs but if they do, this will get sorted out, ONE WAY or the other.
My polite inquiry to Tumblr
What Tumblr Said Back
