GIFs are animated very simply by flipping a series of individual images really fast. Netscape Navigator 2.0 first supported animated looping GIFs in 1995. The GIF format was created in 1987 as an efficient format to allow slow modems to download large images. To solve for this, we began converting GIFs to videos after building out our native video platform in 2016. Because GIFs are large and need a memory-intensive library to decode from compressed format into raw pixels, our iOS app would run out of memory and crash. Additionally, the GIF library on our iOS app uses a large amount of memory to decode and display the animation. GIFs are much larger than images and videos and therefore take longer to download. Over time we’ve worked to improve load times and use less memory to avoid crashes, which hurt the user experience and engagement. Identifying improvements for GIFsĪ small team built support for GIFs in 2014 after a night of hacking at Makeathon. As part of the video and image platform team’s work, we uncovered that converting GIFs to videos decreased load time, increased playback smoothness and reduced app crashes. Pinterest is one of the most image-heavy services online, and so it’s crucial that we constantly work to improve the speed and quality of those images, whether static, GIF or video.

Tianyu Lang & Nick DeChant| Pinterest engineers, Video & Image Platform

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