Searching for the elusive animated JPEG

May 17, 2010 8:31 AM

Somebody figured out a way to put animated images on facebook. I'd like to use this feature but I don't know how.

You'll notice these images don't have a .gif extension. They seem to be jpegs. Googling turned up some info about creating animated jpegs using GIMP, but it seemed quite complicated. Anyone know a simple way to take an existing animated gif and converting it to this format?
Thanks in advance

posted by Silky Slim to computers & internet (8 answers total)

The issue, of course, is that facebook blocks animated gif images.
posted by Silky Slim at 8:33 AM on May 17, 2010

Those are definitely GIFs. Run any of them through MediaInfo or your favorite Paint clone. My guess is just changing the extension to any sufficiently small image to jpg means that FB won't resize it, thus preserving the animation. Even if FB thinks it's a jpg, your browser knows it's a GIF - Firefox even renames it appropriately when I click and drag. You'll notice that none of these GIFs are particularly big.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 8:37 AM on May 17, 2010

The image is a GIF with a .jpg extension.
posted by ardgedee at 8:39 AM on May 17, 2010

Yes. Those are gifs with a jpg extension. You'd have to make sure what you're uploading is small enough that FB doesn't resize it because then it will only take the first frame of the gif for the resized jpeg.

This is so great to see FB pages start to look like MySpace! I'm going to Blingee right now!
posted by birdherder at 8:45 AM on May 17, 2010 [5 favorites]

Odds are good this loophole won't go unnoticed for very long so I wouldn't invest too much time or energy into it if I were you.
posted by Kimberly at 9:05 AM on May 17, 2010

Has anyone been able to reproduce this? I've tried using my own re-sized and also one downloaded from the linked photo album above and it hasn't been successful. I'm wondering if the answer is really just that they used a resized gif with a jpg extension, because my test doesn't show that works.
posted by jardinier at 11:03 AM on May 17, 2010

Normally when you do a HTTP file upload the browser sends a MIME Content-Type header describing what kind of content it thinks the file is. It could be that if you just rename a file from .jpg to .gif the browser is smart enough to realize this and still reports "image/jpeg". You could get around this by using something like curl or wget to do the upload and forcing the desired header. Incidentally, when you are writing server side scripts to process user uploads you must never trust the Content-Type since it's user-controlled data and can be forged. If you only want to accept jpegs you have to look at the actual body of the file and confirm that it's a jpeg-format file.
posted by Rhomboid at 4:05 PM on May 17, 2010

(I meant image/gif obviously.)
posted by Rhomboid at 4:06 PM on May 17, 2010