Adding a GIF To Your Home Slideshow [Classic]

Katherine Ramirez Updated by Katherine Ramirez

Welcome to our Placester Hacks series. Placester Hacks are Placester-approved tricks and workarounds that allow you to accomplish some customizations that may not seem possible with the current toolsets included in Placester’s products. Keep in mind that these hacks are generally more advanced than standard setup instructions. We recommend only using them if you’re familiar with HTML and website editing.

This article will show you how to add a GIF to your home slideshow. 

What is a GIF and why add it to your site? 

GIF stands for "Graphics Interchange Format" and is an image file format that supports both animated and static images. It is not currently possible to add video to the homepage slideshow, so, adding an animated GIF can be a great workaround.  

Uploading an existing GIF to your slideshow: 
 If you have a GIF or GIFs already on your computer that you would like to use, then you can simply upload your GIF to your slideshow by going to the Slideshow tab within Site Settings.  

 From here, you can select one of the several sets of slideshows to choose from or you can create a new slideshow set. If you select an existing slideshow, you can swap out any of the existing images with a GIF. All you need to do is select the grey Upload button and select the .gif image file from your computer.  

https://gyazo.com/1d773f1739ba6a0baca6beccdac4f74e

 You can find more information on uploading images to your slideshow in this article.. How many GIFs can you upload to a slideshow? The standard 5 still applies for GIFs so if you want to have all five of your slideshow images be GIFs, more power to you! Creating your own GIF:  There are many resources out there to create your own GIFs. One resource that we find easy to use is Giphy's gif maker. With this resource, you can use videos from YouTube, Vimeo, etc., by copying and pasting the video link into the URL bar of the gif maker. 

 You will then see a few seconds of the video appear down below. Even further down, the gif maker will give you the option to select the start time and duration of the video that you are looking to use as well as a caption if you'd like. Once you're ready, click on the Create GIF button to create your GIF. 

https://gyazo.com/0910bb50a8b1bdf8db88c81be05a259f

 Once your GIF has been created, you will be redirected to the page that has Share links for your GIF. You will want to click on the Advanced tab and download your GIF using the blue Download button. Your GIF will download to your computer as an image using .gif as the format. 

https://gyazo.com/1778fd97333e848816328bc214e3d4e4

 From here, you can upload the image to your slideshow as you would a normal image. If you need a refresher on how to add images to your home slideshow, please refer to this article.  Resizing your GIF:  Each theme on our sites has recommended dimensions to ensure images look their best. One free resource that we used can be found here. This resizer will allow you to upload a file from your computer or enter the URL of the GIF you want to resize. To upload, first click the Choose File button, then click the blue Upload! button. 

 This will take you to a page where you can enter the new widths and heights for your GIF. For the percentage and Resize method section, we just left it on the defaults and then clicked the blue Resize it! button. Once the image is resized, it will appear further down the page with the option to save the resized .gif to your computer. 

https://gyazo.com/d78524377d8c9a31128342cb9f316c0c

 Depending on the dimensions of the original GIF, you might not get the exact width or height you ask the resizer for but the resized GIF is bound to look better than the original GIF. Here is the article that includes the dimensions for our site themes.  Need More Help?

If you have additional questions about how to add image files to your slideshow, let our support team know at support@placester.com.

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