# GIF animations cannot be pasted in
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [May 1, 2015, 3:02am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179 "2015-05-01T03:02:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 13
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@purldator](https://meta.discourse.org/u/purldator)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2015, 3:02am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/1 "2015-05-01T03:02:31Z")
I have noticed the last two gifs I have seen here on Meta are static images. It caused the animation to be a single frame, and thus create some [very funny](https://meta.discourse.org/t/replygif-browsing-and-adding-reaction-gifs-easily/14936/71) but also [very disturbing](https://meta.discourse.org/t/paid-plugin-9gag-clone-for-discourse/28075/11) freeze-face reactions.
I’m running the latest stable Chrome and turned off all extensions to eliminate variables specific to my ux. Still the same behavior.
On further page-sourcing, I notice Sully is a png but sausage-slap lady is a gif, yet no animation (I am guessing animation was the intention; the ReplyGIF thread’s context is a big tipoff that an animated gif was implied to actually _be_ there.)
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### Author:  [@Mittineague](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Mittineague)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2015, 3:27am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/2 "2015-05-01T03:27:51Z")
Here is a drag-drop animated gif that is not oneboxed
Are you certain it’s not only the ReplyGIF plugin that is broken?
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### Author:  [@purldator](https://meta.discourse.org/u/purldator)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2015, 3:40am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/3 "2015-05-01T03:40:26Z")
So it’s onebox doing this? And no, this happened on Meta. I don’t think that plugin is installed here as of right now. My explanation was deductive reasoning with the topic’s context (a topic about gif posting) to conclude that the gif of Sully was intended to be animated. I am guessing the sausage-lady instance was suppose to be animated as well.
This has happened before when I tried to CTRL + V a gif into a private message:
That was intended to be animated and instead it saved as a png.
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### Author:  [@ark](https://meta.discourse.org/u/ark)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2015, 4:04am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/4 "2015-05-01T04:04:08Z")
@purldator at least for my gif, no - I linked (intentionally) to a tiny thumbnail version rather than the full hotdog thing, imgur just takes the first frame to generate it
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### Author:  [@purldator](https://meta.discourse.org/u/purldator)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2015, 4:04am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/5 "2015-05-01T04:04:47Z")
Thank you for that. That narrows it down to my gif and the one from the ReplyGIF plugin topic.
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### Author:  [@elberet](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elberet)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2015, 10:44am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/6 "2015-05-01T10:44:51Z")
I don’t think Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V works for GIFs. Browser’s aren’t capable of copying an animation through the clipboard. Whatever frame was visible when you copied the image gets sent to the clipboard and when you paste it in Discourse, that gets uploaded as a PNG.
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### Author:  [@purldator](https://meta.discourse.org/u/purldator)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2015, 12:00pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/7 "2015-05-01T12:00:19Z")
Hmmn. Interesting. But thank you for the clarification.
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### Author:  [@Mittineague](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Mittineague)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2015, 1:29pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/8 "2015-05-01T13:29:31Z")
> [@elberet](#):
>
> I don’t think Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V works for GIFs.
Excellent observation
Same image
**copy - ctrl+v**
**drag - drop**
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### Author:  [@elberet](https://meta.discourse.org/u/elberet)
#### Post date: [May 1, 2015, 2:11pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/9 "2015-05-01T14:11:17Z")
Yeah, it’s a shame that the clipboard is by default quite stupid, and extensions are too platform specific. On Win32 – and in theory –, it should be rather simple to register a clipboard format for arbitrary MIME types and shove entire GIFs straight through Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V, but noooo, that’s way too much work for browser vendors, let’s instead focus on stealing saving more userdata in the cloud… :areyoukiddingme:
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### Author:  [@Basanoviat](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Basanoviat)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2015, 12:13am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/10 "2015-05-02T00:13:26Z")
Yup, sully should have been a gif 😩
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### Author:  [@Basanoviat](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Basanoviat)
#### Post date: [May 2, 2015, 12:16am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/11 "2015-05-02T00:16:37Z")
[http://replygif.net/i/1071.gif](http://replygif.net/i/1071.gif)
drag n drop, but that is just a hyperlink
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2016, 12:09am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/12 "2016-07-26T00:09:34Z")
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### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [March 16, 2022, 5:40pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/gif-animations-cannot-be-pasted-in/28179/13 "2022-03-16T17:40:05Z")
> [@Allow pasting of GIFs into composer](https://meta.discourse.org/t/allow-pasting-of-gifs-into-composer/218720):
>
> Continuing the discussion from [Is it possible to paste images as their source address?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-it-possible-to-paste-images-as-their-source-address/218554): If you right click and select “Copy Image” on a GIF you found on the internet with your browser, your clipboard will be populated with two elements: A static PNG image of the GIF as image/png An HTML img tag with the GIF source as text/html For most use cases, it’s a far better user experience to pick the option 1 in the clipboard and upload that image right away in the composer, so that is what we always…