In my post on Sunday, ‘S’ is for snow, not for shopping, I included a video by Tigger, showing snow falling in Pentonville Road. However, I was not very happy with it because videos are hard to handle on WordPress and often display badly. I temporarily replaced it with an animated GIF made from one of my own live photos. I have now restored the video, processed as described below.

Thinking about this problem afterwards, I had an idea. I have already found a good way to display iPhone live photos on the blog by converting them to GIFs (see Live photos on your blog). What if I could convert a video into a GIF? Experience suggests that, if I could, it would display nicely and would loop without any need to click a start button. Is such a conversion possible?

Yes, of course it is! In this age of modern digital technology there exist applications to convert practically any file format into any other. Not only that: there are online sites that perform the conversion free of charge.

I am not going to cite any particular websites for converting files as I am still trying them out. There are plenty of them, though, and they are not hard to find.

My first action, then, was to have the video .mov file converted to GIF. The original .mov was 6,976 KB in size. This is a large file but WordPress had uploaded it without demur. The resulting GIF, however, weighed in at 13,631 KB! What would WordPress think of that?

Not much, apparently. I tried uploading it several times in different ways but it failed each time. WordPress advertises a limit on file size of 1 GB, and GIF I was trying to upload was smaller than that but I still couldn’t persuade WordPress to upload it.

It seemed that my idea was a non-starter…

A couple of days passed. Then I had another idea. (Yes, two ideas in one week! Imagine!) My idea came in the form of a question: does there exist a facility for compressing GIF files? You can guess the answer to that: yes, of course such a facility exists. And there are online sites that will do it free of charge.

I tried one and the resulting compressed GIF was 5,373 KB in size. Surely WordPress would accept that? Yes, of course it did.

What about the quality? Is it good enough to post on the blog? I think so but here it is so that you can judge for yourself (and you can view it in situ in its own post):

Snow in Pentonville Road
Video by Tigger

This video is fairly short. A longer video would of course produce a bigger GIF file, even when compressed, and so there is a limit to the length of video that can be processed in this way.

I don’t expect to be posting many videos on the blog but if one comes along that I really want to include, then this method may offer a way to do it.

Please note that this process is experimental and I offer no guarantees of success. If you try it you do so at your own risk. Always keep separate backup copies of your originals.