glitch gifs

though i've been dabbling in glitch video for years (as my youtube channel will attest), one format i haven't worked with too much is the animated gif... until recently, that is.


i've been posting these full-size on flickr—here is my flickr set of glitch videos and animations. but there's one big problem with hosting animated gifs on flickr: flickr automatically creates copies of your images in multiple sizes, but its resizing scripts don't preserve animations. (in fact, they're automatically converted to jpg regardless of your original image format. so my resized gifs aren't even gifs anymore!)

as such, the only way to view animated gifs on flickr is to view them at original size. this sort of works for me, but only because i post most of my images using a creative commons license. (original size view is not available on copyrighted photos.)



in short, flickr is a pretty lousy service for hosting animated gifs. yes, you can host the files there and save yourself the server space, but flickr's sharing facilities just aren't set up to support animated gifs. flickr does support video files, but there's no way to make them loop (which is kind of the point of making gifs).

however, i've identified a better service for sharing gifs: google+! google+ allows you to post animated gifs right to your stream, where others can +1 them, reshare them, leave snooty comments, and whatnot. (at least in web browsers; i've heard reports that the mobile g+ apps don't yet support animated gifs.) you do still need to worry about the images being resized, but only if they're wider than 402 pixels. this isn't ideal, but it works well enough, so if you're on google+ and want to see some glitch gifs, go ahead and add me. ¶