Learn how to use a GIF as a profile picture on Google to showcase your personality and stand out online. Follow our step-by-step guide now!
GIFs are one of the great hallmarks of the modern Internet, and there are already a lot of social networks and web services that allow you to use them as an avatar. Thus, we can create our own GIF directly from our mobile phone and use it, for example, as a profile image on our Google account .
Basically, a GIF is nothing more than an “animated” file that is halfway between an image and a video: a collection of images or frames that give a sensation of movement. In the early years of the Internet, this graphic format (Graphics Interchange Format) acquired great popularity, since it allowed the LZW compression algorithm to be used – more efficient than the RLE algorithm that was used at that time – to compress images. Something that was great for downloading large images at a time when modems were still very slow and Internet connections were practically in their infancy.
GIF as a profile photo in your Google account
GIFs are one of the most used formats to share memes, although in this case they can also be used to put an animated profile photo or a short video of a couple of seconds on our Google account. It is important that the GIF file that we are going to create is not very long, if we do not want to have problems when loading it and uploading it to the network.
That said, once we have created or downloaded the GIF (a little further down I explain how to easily create your own GIF), we open the browser and go to the settings of our Google account by entering myaccount.google.com . Once we have logged in, we can change our profile photo simply by clicking on it (we will see how a camera icon appears if we hover over or click on the photo itself).
- This will open a window where the current profile image will be displayed in full size. We will click on « Change ».
- Next, a new window will open where we can choose the GIF from the internal storage memory of our device. We can also upload the new profile image from Google Photos or using the phone’s camera.
- Next, a small editor will open where we can trim the margins of the image so that the format and dimensions fit perfectly.
- When we have everything ready, we just have to click on the “ Next ” button and then “ Save as profile image ”. Automatically, Google will apply the changes, replacing the previous static image with this new GIF animation that we just pulled out of our sleeve.
- It should be noted that the changes may take a while to be replicated on all the sites where our Google profile photo is displayed. Normally, refreshing the page or giving it a couple of minutes is usually enough, but if we see that it takes a while we can try to force it by removing and re-establishing the GIF as the profile photo.
Can I use a video as a profile picture?
The Google profile image must be an image or at most a GIF. But what about the videos? Basically, a video and a GIF are not so different: in both cases moving images are shown.
That said, it is clear that Google will not let us set a video to AVI, MP4 or MKV format natively, but we can use a small and simple trick that consists of converting the video to GIF format. This is a fairly quick process that we can carry out using a GIF editor. For this example we will use the “Animated GIF Maker” tool from EZGif. It is free, online and does not require registration:
- Open the browser and enter the Animated GIF Maker page .
- In the “Upload Images” section, click on ” Choose file ” and select the video you want to convert.
- Click on « Upload files! «.
- Once the video is loaded in the editor, we can make some adjustments, such as the duration of the GIF, the size or the framerate
- When everything is to our liking, we will click on « Convert to GIF! «.
- The conversion process may take a few seconds, depending on the quality and length of the video.
- When it is ready, the GIF will appear just below, in the “Output GIF” section. All you have to do is click on the “ Save ” icon to download a copy of the GIF we just created.
