Christian Heilmann

Quick Tip: Save Twitter GIFs as MP4 without any add-on or service

Monday, April 12th, 2021 at 1:04 pm

When you want to save a GIF from Twitter, the interface plays a cruel joke on you. If you context-click the GIF you get a menu that states “Copy GIF address”.

Copy GIF address context menu on Twitter

All it does though is copy a link to the tweet with the GIF in it, which is pretty pointless. Under the hood Twitter also converts any GIF to MP4 because it is a much more effective file format.

Knowing this, the easiest way to save the GIF is to open DevTools, go to the Console and type/copy:

window.open(document.querySelector('video').src)

This opens the GIF as a video in a new tab and you can save it there as shown in this screencast:

saving a GIF from Twitter

Of course there are a myriad of web services, Twitter bots and other things that do the same for you and also in more advanced fashion, but I think it is always a very good idea to not trust any service that offers to save protected content from the web for you. I’ve seen far too many malware browser extensions in that arena.

Share on Mastodon (needs instance)

Share on Twitter

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