Do I need to say more? As a communication medium, the GIF is an absolute staple when it comes to messaging platforms across the board. Need a witty, lighthearted-yet-thoughtful reply to an email? The perfect GIF carries the message intent along with a level of comedy and/or meaning that mere words simply cannot replicate. Whether it is for conveying the proper tone of a message or just for the fun of it, GIFs as a message medium are without peer.
Unfortunately for Chromebook users to this point, there hasn’t been a simple, straightforward way to get those GIFs in your messages if the messaging service you are using doesn’t provide them. Sure, WhatsApp, Discord or Google Messages can deliver a GIF for you, but what about something like Gmail? With so many ways to message so many people on the web these days, it’s tough to keep up with which services have GIF support baked in and which don’t.
But for many of us, we don’t really have to think about that on our phones any longer. Keyboards like Gboard provide a built-in GIF finder that I use all the time. I can hit the GIF icon on my keyboard in any scenario and have a GIF that matches the tone of my message in just seconds, but that’s not always the case on a Chromebook. That’s all about to change, though.
GIF selection is on the way for ChromeOS
Thanks to a find by C2 Productions over on Twitter, we’ve become aware that GIF support is now working in the Canary Channel of ChromeOS 111 and that means it likely won’t be long until we see this in the Stable Channel. The interface is simple and with a quick press of SEARCH+SHIFT+SPACE, you’ll pull up the emoji picker that now has a GIF selector built right in.
Once you click on that GIF icon up top, you’ll get a searchable grid of matching selections just like we see with other messaging services and keyboards. From the looks of it, those GIFs are coming from all sorts of places around the web, and as long as you aren’t trying to use them for commercial reasons, there’s no need to worry about the source of the file for licensing reasons.
Though I don’t use the emoji picker on my Chromebook too often, I could see myself using this new addition very frequently. While not a game-changing addition to the ChromeOS world, it is yet another small, helpful change that makes digital life a bit easier on everyone who uses a Chromebook. For people like me, those small tweaks are always a welcome change.
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