You may have noticed that you can't save animated GIFs from Twitter the same way you could save them from any other website. Most of the time, all you have to do is right-click on the image and save it. But on Twitter, the option to save the image in the context menu does not exist. This is because Twitter actually converts all animated GIFs into short video files to increase load times. The downside is that you can't directly save these "GIFs" as images.
Well, we have a few different workarounds to explore if you really want to save a GIF as it should be… a GIF. It won't be as simple as a simple right click, but you can still have your GIF in just a few steps.
Android users, you were in luck. It turns out that the Google Play Store has a very handy free app that lets you skip the advanced method of downloading GIFs altogether.
The app is called Tweet2gif and as you can imagine, it allows you to automatically download any animated GIF from any public tweet. All you have to do is navigate to the tweet you want to save a GIF from in your Twitter app. Tap the tweet to expand the details, then tap the Next menu and select Copy link to tweet .
Go to Tweet2gif on your Android phone and paste the link. From there, you can choose to download it as a GIF file or optionally as an MP4 video file. The rest is history.
If you're on another platform and can't download Tweet2gif, you still have a little work to do to get your GIF. (Don't worry, it doesn't take long.) What you need to do is first upload the MP4 video file of the GIF to Twitter. Then convert this MP4 file to GIF file. Let's review both.
Tip: This is best done on a Mac or PC rather than a mobile device.
An easy way to download a GIF from Twitter as a video is to go to saveeo.com. Much like Tweet2gif, all you have to do here is paste the URL of the tweet you're using. So take that, paste and click Download . On the new page, click on the smaller Download link on the right. Since GIFs are rarely longer than a few seconds, the MP4 should finish downloading almost instantly.
Note: Depending on the browser you are using, you may need to right-click or control-click the Download link and choose Download Linked File or Save Link As… rather. Make sure, however, that it is still saved in MP4 format.
Now it's time to convert. Visit ezgif.com and click Video to GIF in the menu. Find your saved MP4 file and upload it.
You can play around with a bunch of different options, but if you just want to go straight to the download, skip this. The only thing I would recommend is changing the frame rate (FPS) to 20 seconds for smoother animation. Finally, click Convert to GIF!
The animated GIF appears below and finally you can do what you wanted to do all along:right click and save. It wasn't too tedious, was it?
Have you seen our guide to recording an animated GIF by directly recording the animation on your screen? If you can time it right, it works great to save looping animation on Twitter as your own.
