Animated GIFs don't work

March 20, 2017

I have searched the forum, but couldn't find anything.

I'm trying to add a couple og animated gifs to my unpublished cache's description. I have uploaded the .gif-files to geocaching.com's server. Then I have tried several different html -code-versions for adding pictures, but none of them will work.

Do you have any suggestions for making this work?

Thanks for your answer! :-)

1.7k · March 20, 2017

I have a couple of cache pages with animated gifs on them.

This is one of them and it has two animated gifs, one served up from geocaching.com's server and one from mine.

All I did was upload the animated gif, get the URL to the image, and insert into the cache page like so:

<img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gs-geo-images/4f6ec9cc-48db-4720-8a03-5088455b9287.gif" />

1.7k · March 20, 2017

Note - when you upload your animated gif, the "preview" page that shows the image you just uploaded will NOT show it animating, but if you click on the image you will view the ACTUAL uploaded image, it will be animating, and you can copy the URL from the address bar in your browser. That may be the step you're missing.

March 20, 2017

I have a couple of cache pages with animated gifs on them.

This is one of them and it has two animated gifs, one served up from geocaching.com's server and one from mine.

All I did was upload the animated gif, get the URL to the image, and insert into the cache page like so:

<img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gs-geo-images/4f6ec9cc-48db-4720-8a03-5088455b9287.gif" />

Thanks for your answer! I tried the html you wrote, inserted the image link from the server, but nothing happens.

Are there different types of GIF-files? I made mine using IMGFLIP.COM.

Edited March 20, 2017 by FREDskorpset

1.7k · March 20, 2017

We posted again at the same time, see my second post above and see if that helps

March 20, 2017

Nope, nothing happens wherever I click them. They do exactly what I want them to do when I open them in the computers gallery, but not in the uploaded versions in the browser. I also tried both Dropbox and Onedrive, but nothing.

15.5k · March 20, 2017

Note - when you upload your animated gif, the "preview" page that shows the image you just uploaded will NOT show it animating, but if you click on the image you will view the ACTUAL uploaded image, it will be animating, and you can copy the URL from the address bar in your browser. That may be the step you're missing.

I just wanted to emphasize the above. There are a number of situations where the server does not show the uploaded image file, but instead shows a processed copy of the uploaded image file. Things like GIF animation won't work in the processed copies. You need to view the uploaded image file itself.

1.7k · March 20, 2017

I just now tried it again and it worked fine for me.

1. From the cache page, click Upload Images

2. Select your animated gif and upload it

3. A preview of your uploaded file is displayed along with some other links - click on the preview image (that won't be animating)

4. Your uploaded image, animating, will be displayed, and nothing else. Copy the URL from the address bar

5. Paste this URL into your img tag on your cache page - <img src="paste your URL here">

6. Enjoy your animated gif on your cache page

March 20, 2017

THANKS! I finally understood what you meant and it worked like a charm! Now, if only the reviewer accepts it :-P

Thanks for your help! :-)

1.7k · March 20, 2017

You're welcome. Good luck!

3.8k · March 21, 2017

When I did mine I had to self host. I should try them as uploaded to the cache listing..

La Viuda Negra en Battle Creek

July 27, 2017

I just tried funkymunkys steps and when I click the preview image it still isn't animated... I have seen on other forums that deleting the /large from the url will make it work but that doesn't work all the time.

its weird because out of 8 of my caches 1 of them the gifs actually work! i'm sure sure what I'm doning wrong on the others I'm doing the same steps.

any help would be great.

ps. bad a** gif on your page bflentje that is beyond my skill level, wish I knew how to put in overlay gifs like that. but I can't even do the simple ones lol

August 4, 2017

Hello, I found the problem too and asked HQ why!

They simply gave this answer.
" We are no longer support GIF images on our website. You will need to upload a JPEG file."

I asked some more question regarding this problem but they did not answer them! 
The only response was:

 "We changed the way we allow images on our website for security reasons."  

Asking for a reason for the second time and answer to my other questions, they did not answer it till now!!!
A very bad behaviour in my opinion. No warning before on the site or at the moment you are uploading a picture!

Typically a Geocaching.com HQ answer that ignores its members and does not inform them ! 
So Sorry for that!

Edited August 5, 2017 by Zonnetje

13.9k · September 15, 2017

When looking at some folks "dashboards" , I used to time out over all that carp...

Edited to add... I see someone must have agreed, since it's now gone (numerous posts of just animations).

Edited September 15, 2017 by cerberus1

September 16, 2017

For all pictures and gif here is what I do.

Find a gif copy and save it in your computer. Then upload an image, gif to your cache page. Remember to give it a name. Then go to your cache page. Lower left side above logs you will see icon for your image. Click it when open copy the http address. Then close that image. In note pad type this code. Then save that file. You will want to use it over and over. Highlite the words code goes here then paste that http that you coppied. Now highlite that whole line of code. Paste that into the 500 word box where you edit the cache page.

All done good to go.

2.7k · September 16, 2017

None of that animated carp shows up on my gps, so I hope it isn't necessary for the cache itself.

September 18, 2017

The pictures or animation never goes to any GPS unit. However it may show up on a smart phone.

2.7k · September 18, 2017

1 hour ago, Mn-treker said:

The pictures or animation never goes to any GPS unit. However it may show up on a smart phone.

The OP wanted to add animated gif to the cache description page.

I'm trying to add a couple og animated gifs to my unpublished cache's description. I have uploaded the .gif-files to geocaching.com's server. Then I have tried several different html -code-versions for adding pictures, but none of them will work.

I really hope that isn't something that is allowed, as it doesn't appear on my GPS.

15.5k · September 18, 2017

1 hour ago, K13 said:

The OP wanted to add animated gif to the cache description page.

Quote

I'm trying to add a couple og animated gifs to my unpublished cache's description. I have uploaded the .gif-files to geocaching.com's server. Then I have tried several different html -code-versions for adding pictures, but none of them will work.

I really hope that isn't something that is allowed, as it doesn't appear on my GPS.

It's definitely allowed. I've found a number of caches that have had animated GIF images displayed on the cache pages.

I assumed that they were hosted on other servers though, given that geocaching.com converts everything to JPEG.

13.9k · September 19, 2017

5 hours ago, niraD said:

It's definitely allowed. I've found a number of caches that have had animated GIF images displayed on the cache pages.

I assumed that they were hosted on other servers though, given that geocaching.com converts everything to JPEG.

Years ago we found a couple, none recently, some pretty complex.

One that may have been the worst (for animation) , bright flashing, dancing strobe-like squares (and by the cache page) made many uncomfortable to look at any length of time to solve. It was annoying enough that we wondered whether it'd be an issue with some epileptics.

September 20, 2017

On 9/18/2017 at 3:57 PM, K13 said:

The OP wanted to add animated gif to the cache description page.

I really hope that isn't something that is allowed, as it doesn't appear on my GPS.

Try what I have listed in my earlier post.

There is a line of HTML code there. Copy that to notepad. Up load your gif to your cache page. On the cache page open that gif. Copy what is in the address bar. Then paste that in the HTML code that I gave. Place it in place of the statement code goes here. Make sure those quotation marks stay put.

Then copy and paste your new HTML code line into the cache page. But you will need to go to edit on your cache page and place it in the box for 500 characters. Then click those two little boxes at bottom of the edit page to accept all that. Should be good to go.

That is what I do.

April 11, 2018

Not sure if anyone's still following this thread but I have the same issue. I've followed everything that's been suggested above but it doesn't work. Doesn't even show a still image. Nothing. Any other suggestions please?

Also don't understand why Groundspeak (above) say they don't support gifs anymore when I can still see loads of cache pages, incuidng some very recent ones, that contain animated gifs!

April 28, 2018

Damned annoying that it doesn't work anymore. Seems like many of us are wanting to do this.

June 3, 2018

GIF nie działa !!!!

kod:

14k · June 8, 2018

On 6/3/2018 at 9:46 PM, gc_jambi said:

GIF nie działa !!!!

kod:

<center><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/gs-geo-images/d5c2b4ff-2b7a-4a1c-b660-9f1391c579f8_l.gif" /></center>

I wonder what that would look like when viewing the cache listing on my handheld GPS.

October 27, 2020

I am trying to build a couple of caches that use gifs and am running into some hurdles that seem to have been put up since Mn-Treker's solution in 2017.
Here's a breakdown of what I've tried
1) Upload the gif to the cache page - it only displays as a still image. I tried using img src like I have for a lot of images in my cache pages but it only displays a still image.

2) I tried to skip the cache page upload and link to the gif on a site. I am blocked by geocaching.com saying I need to, "Remove all images hosted on a third-party website to save changes. Tip: Upload images directly to the cache page with the user-friendly editor."

3) Next I looked at the URL of where geocaching uploads images to: https://s3.amazonaws.com/gs-geo-images..... and tried to set up my own s3 amazon web service storage. Well... It still counted it as a third-party website.

I'm guessing there might be some other way to upload to the cache page that stops it just becoming a JPEG or imitating the s3 link that looks more like their own but I can't find a solution right now.

January 3, 2021

So this is now a grave concern, as far as mainly doing Puzzles because Animations are one of the easiest things to create and put together.

The old ones worked, and have been pulled-in to Geocaching, but some of the newer ones that i moved off PhotoBucket (puke) because of their cost-to-host, no longer work because of the "third party restrictions" that are now part of Groundspeak and the Geocaching Pages.

Any suggestions on this one? Again some of my older stuff works but having to upload the images all to Geocaching is even more tedious AND the fact that the Animated GIF's no longer do their thing, is a bigger bug.

Thanks

-- RayQix - Metro Detroit/SE Michigan USA

January 3, 2021

Just had an idea: try uploading each individual frame of the gif as separate images but use a piece of html for an automatic gallery with the carousel speed set down to 300 or so...

https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/w3css_slideshow.asp

I'll try it once i'm home and let you know.

January 3, 2021

51 minutes ago, CheekyBrit said:

Just had an idea: try uploading each individual frame of the gif as separate images but use a piece of html for an automatic gallery with the carousel speed set down to 300 or so...

https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/w3css_slideshow.asp

I'll try it once i'm home and let you know.

That's not going to work; JavaScript is not allowed in geocache descriptions.

January 3, 2021

Just now, Hügh said:

That's not going to work; JavaScript is not allowed in geocache descriptions.

Thank you for saving me some time and a headache. I'll look around for a non javascript option.

I could always have a hyperlink to the gif perhaps...

7.3k · January 3, 2021

Third party hosting is allowed from DropBox, Google Drive and OneDrive. See this Help Centre page for more info. If you host your GIF on one of those it should work.

January 6, 2021

SOLVED! Barefootjeff's link to approved hosting sites is great, but pulling the gif from google drive to your cache page needs some tweaking. This is how.

1) Upload your gif to google drive and set sharing so anyone can view

A) With gif open, top right there will be three white dots for 'more actions', click them and open up 'share'.

The bottom box shows 'get link'. Within there click the blue text "change" and select "anyone with the link".

C) To the right, open up the dropdown box and ensure 'viewer' is selected instead of commenter or editor.
D) Copy the link, though it needs some work.

2) To adjust the link, paste the link you just copied so you can make edits. It will look something like this:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KftZsgelK-CGpoWDRsEB3ezCCyYZP5Wf/view?usp=sharing

Whatever you have after drive.google.com and before the long string of numbers and letters, remove it and replace it with "/uc?id="
Also chop off the end portion including the forward slash, "/view?usp=sharing" in my case.
In my example I'm left with https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1KftZsgelK-CGpoWDRsEB3ezCCyYZP5Wf
This doesn't end with .gif, but worked for me.

3) Insert it using the same HTML you would normally, <img src="link entered here" > and you're good to go.

Edited January 6, 2021 by CheekyBrit

7.3k · January 6, 2021

Glad you got it to work! I've just been helping out a caching friend who's been trying to do a similar thing with a GIF file hosted on DropBox. Again, you can't just use the URL DropBox gives you on your cache page, you need to change the ?dl=0 at the end to ?dl=1.

It would be helpful if something about these tweaks needed to use the approved hosts could be included in the Help Centre page.

Edited January 7, 2021 by barefootjeff
Spelling

January 28, 2021

On 1/6/2021 at 9:19 PM, CheekyBrit said:

SOLVED! Barefootjeff's link to approved hosting sites is great, but pulling the gif from google drive to your cache page needs some tweaking. This is how.

Thanks so much for these instructions which were of tremendous help in fixing a broken gif image !

December 29, 2021

Sorry, this solution no longer works today :mad:
Try to pu a gif with google drive, certitudes and some more domains see in this Help Centre page and no ones works.
Try to put a gif into a log, there's only a still image.

Edited December 29, 2021 by OLImages

3.2k · December 29, 2021

11 hours ago, OLImages said:

Sorry, this solution no longer works today
Try to pu a gif with google drive, certitudes and some more domains see in this Help Centre page and no ones works.
Try to put a gif into a log, there's only a still image.

Just tested that this works: <img src="https://www.dropbox.com/s/1edsigndbe78l7x/rain.gif?dl=1">

January 5, 2022

Hi,

Sorry for being (very) late.

On 1/6/2021 at 9:21 PM, barefootjeff said:

you can't just use the URL DropBox gives you on your cache page, you need to change the ?dl=0 at the end to ?dl=1

and

On 12/29/2021 at 10:32 PM, arisoft said:

Just tested that this works: <img src="https://www.dropbox.com/s/1edsigndbe78l7x/rain.gif?dl=1">

Actually, there is a better query string parameter for this usage. You should replace ?dl=0 by ?raw=1.

The example given by arisoft would become

<img src="https://www.dropbox.com/s/1edsigndbe78l7x/rain.gif?raw=1">

Source: https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/force-download

March 1, 2022

That new string should work well. Thanks for that. The google drive option I posted is still working for the geocache pages I set up a few months ago so it might only be an issue for NEW geocaches.
https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC9H56R is one of mine with a working gif using the google drive approach.

April 17, 2022

On 3/1/2022 at 2:49 PM, CheekyBrit said:

That new string should work well. Thanks for that. The google drive option I posted is still working for the geocache pages I set up a few months ago so it might only be an issue for NEW geocaches.
https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC9H56R is one of mine with a working gif using the google drive approach.

Thanks CheekyBrit. The Google drive option was working great for me as well. That is, up until a couple of weeks ago. Up until recently I had never needed an animation on any of my geocache pages. On a recent puzzle: "Perplexing Platonic Polyhedra (P3)", I felt that it was necessary to use animations to help outline the problem.

Everything worked great, until about two weeks ago. one of the animations showed a broken link symbol. Today, someone pointed out to me that there were four broken links.

Obviously, I don't want to have to continually update broken links. I'm hoping that someone has another idea about how to get around this.

November 8, 2022

Is it possible to put animated gifs in a listing? It seems the system has changed a short while ago.

November 27, 2022

My geocaches with gifs in the geocache description page still work. @kaboutererwhen you say 'listing' is that the geocache description page or something else?

December 4, 2022

Yes the geocache discription.

December 5, 2022

Yes it is working fine. GCA1VF8 coming out soon.

January 12, 2024

HQ have played with their code and the google drive image link code no longer works.
I used code mentioned here and have two puzzle caches that worked neatly for a while, but now have broken links. GCAHKV3 and GCAJ4KK
Let me know if you get a fix.
Regards

January 12, 2024

This is across all approved 3rd party image hosting techniques for transparent PNGs and GIFs. I noticed it worked on Wednesday but not on Friday. Sad days. I tried adjusting things and nothing I have tried works yet. The images definitely work on the google drive end so it is certainly the HQ code adjustment Freddo mentioned.

January 12, 2024

Me too. I am using google drive image hosting. All of my listings are not showing all images for past 3 days. I am always managing the google drive link to example: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=XXXXXX . How are you managing gdrive links? Same way as mine? It is not the reason why the images are not showing?

Thanks for any response, have a nice day.

January 19, 2024

On 1/12/2024 at 8:26 AM, GlobeKeeper said:

Me too. I am using google drive image hosting. All of my listings are not showing all images for past 3 days. I am always managing the google drive link to example: https://drive.google.com/uc?id=XXXXXX . How are you managing gdrive links? Same way as mine? It is not the reason why the images are not showing?

Thanks for any response, have a nice day.

That was how I did it, but now we need a whole new approach.

March 26, 2024

On 1/19/2024 at 11:25 PM, CheekyBrit said:

That was how I did it, but now we need a whole new approach.

Me too!
When I noticed that alpha channel was ignored in images uploaded in Geocaching.com, I tried third parties storages, and it worked!
But after that, Geocaching.com refused to handle free third parties images storages. So I tried to upload the gif in my personal google drive (approved hosting site), and it worked!
But recently, the image is no more displayed on my page.
What shall I do?? What is the "new approach"?

September 4, 2024

I also see the gifs are now broken. I have old caches that still work but can't seem to find a way to get a gif to load on the page. Any help?

7.3k · September 4, 2024

1 hour ago, korysan said:

I also see the gifs are now broken. I have old caches that still work but can't seem to find a way to get a gif to load on the page. Any help?

Since about five or so years ago, all images uploaded to the geocaching site have their contents quietly converted to progressive jpeg, although the file suffix isn't changed. If you want your images to be exactly what you uploaded, you need to use one of the approved third party hosting sites as described in this Help Centre page.

Animated GIFs don't work

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