Embed GIFs in stories so the new play button works properly

America has spoken: We love animated GIFs! We love creating them, we love watching them over and over and over.

Unfortunately, our mobile devices are not as fond of them. GIF files are large and downloading them is resource intensive. Having to load multiple GIFs causes mobile browsers to crash.

Bleacher Report’s Development team has come up with a solution to this problem by putting play buttons on GIFs on both our phone and tablet article pages. This will allow GIFs to load one at a time.

These buttons only work if when creating your story you embed the GIFs using media slots. Just upload them like you would any other photo. Although you or your editor may have access to edit the raw HTML of the article, please avoid embedding GIFs in this way.

Thanks for your help on this. This small change should be a nice improvement to our ever increasing percentage of mobile users.

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Ross Schwaber is a Senior Product Manager at Bleacher Report.