GIF animations to document blogs

I think GIFs are fine dependent upon the content: simple animations are ok; anything that I may want to pause to make sense of what is going on could be a problem.  So I would say, use them selectively and they will be very useful because they don't require additional clicks to view them.

Personally I think they are a great idea provided they are not overly used, or showing way too much to interpret (as I think Andrew also suggests). They provide for a way for people to peek into your world of testing or whatever, without the user having to make much effort. 

Regarding the 'too much to interpret', I have that problem with understanding some photos. Not all need annotations or a description, but sometimes it is really hard to understand what the writer intended to show in a photo without a big arrow to point things out. For sure video can help too, but there is the significant overhead of video creation, getting the audio and lighting just right, etc., it's not always appropriate.

Similarly (but differently), it would be nice to see the image system improved one day for static images too, because today it is a lot of clicking just to peek into areas of someones project photos. This looked really neat, it works with pinch-to-zoom and mouse scroll button: https://openseadragon.github.io/  (Edit:) Looks like openseadragon can be adapted to work with animated GIFs too: https://codepen.io/antonioxdias/pen/JmZova  

Also, SVG support one day would be awesome, since then everything is searchable [example use-case for this is circuit diagrams]. Even SVG animations could be interesting then. I suspect element14'ers are pushing the boundaries of traditional blogs way more than other websites.

I think GIFs are interesting and are fun to experiment with. I definitely consider myself a beginner at GIFs lol  I also have a difficult time creating gif with a small filesize from video.

A cause and effect GIF like the following I think adds great value:

And its only 85 kB

Here is a GIF with good intentions, but is difficult to understand on its own.

It was intended to show the circuit sleeping at 700 nA, but it is difficult to make that out just looking at the GIF on its own.

Freehand video turned into a GIF doesn't look that great either.

One of the previous Community Managers once mentioned something that has stuck with me.. he once stated that when writing a blog, there's no need to write what is in a photo, because people can see for themselves what is in the photo. I thought that was pretty useful insight, because then it made me think what is in a photo? The way I interpreted it, is that if I'm writing a blog, then my photo(s) should be able to describe themselves, i.e. make the photo clear, or at least have arrows or annotation to place focus in the right place, and then the text doesn't need to describe the photo. Not saying I always manage to observe this, but it has helped as a guideline for me.  The 700nA GIF would not be clear so would need text to explain, by which point perhaps the GIF may be of very limited use.

They can work well in certain cases and are something I’ve been meaning to try. Your example with the time and frequency domain is a good one. 

I agree that animated GIFs can add a dynamic multimedia element to a dry explanation. There are lots of tools to help convert images or videos to animated GIFs, but it can take significantly work to make a single animated GIF than a complete video. I tend to use them sparingly, because they need to get the concept across in a short sequence. Since GIFs are treated as images, the size limitation is far smaller than for video content. I seem to spend a lot of time trying to get a reasonable animation sequence to fit within the size limitations.

I think that is really great advise. Often when browsing sites I will skim through a potential page only looking at the images/figures to decided if I want to read it. As you suggest making images/figures clear can go along ways.

shabaz said:

e once stated that when writing a blog, there's no need to write what is in a photo, because people can see for themselves what is in the photo

It feels like we've come full circle, because while that's good advice from a narrative perspective, it's bad advice from an accessibility screen reader perspective for someone that needs to have web pages and blogs read out to them. Though this (should) be a reason why we have (descriptive) 'alt' text tags on images so that the screen readers can interpret what they see and describe them (as they would be seen by someone that can visualise the image/animation).

Jan Cumps said:

Thoughts?

I love gifs, from a technical standpoint I hate gifs.

They're old tech' which are outdated, unoptimised and many sites automatically replace them with embedded MP4 videos because MP4 videos can auto play just like them, are smaller in size, and are better optimised for slow website/transmission delivery.

I love how much information they can convey, as you say, and sometimes a gif speaks for itself.

How do you suggest MP4 videos be embedded in e14 if autoplay is desired?  Is it necessary to edit the HTML?