WhatsApp recently revealed over 63 billion messages were being sent globally on New Year’s Eve and of the 63 billion messages sent, 7.9 billion images – photos, and GIF. Notably, after the Facebook-owned social messaging platform introduced it’s GIF support in November for iOS users and December for Android users last year, looks like the platform has gone another step further to integrate the GIF search support into the app, and also raised the media sharing limit from 10 to 30.
WhatsApp GIF search feature
When GIF support first launched in November and December for iOS and Android users respectively, users could convert live images or videos into short GIFs and send them on WhatsApp, or you could simply share your saved GIF’s directly from the phone. However, with the new GIF search feature, the integration of Giphy makes GIF-sharing extremely seamless.
WhatsApp beta v2.17.6 for Android now have the ability to search for GIF images and use them in chat conversations. A new GIF icon now appears at the bottom when you tap on the emoji button.
According to NDTV news who reported this, said on opening the GIF section throws a lot of popular GIF sharing options available on Giphy. You can even search for related GIFs using keywords. Notably, not all users are seeing Giphy as the GIF image search integration.
Media Sharing Limit
Furthermore on WhatsApp Updates, the media sharing limit that was previously capped at 10 has now been raised to 30. This change will allow WhatsApp users who love to share bulk images.[related-posts]
The features are still available on WhatsApp Android Beta version, and for those willing to try these feature should be in WhatsApp Beta community. However, you can join the Beta testing community on Google Play.
There was no mention of when these features would be available on the stable versions of WhatsApp.
One other feature WhatsApp Users ought to wait for, is the ability to let you edit and revoke sent messages, and also the ability to preview shared archive files, such as ZIP and RAR files. This particular feature will be available for iOS users first before it comes to Android users.
