Animated GIFs on Facebook desktop – GONE!

If you do Facebook on your desktop or laptop computer, you probably see a lot of posts that have a bunch of comments that are just animated GIFs. I find nothing more annoying than that. But now I don’t see them any more!

There are actually a lot of things that I find really annoying about Facebook:

1. People who create a new post that says something like, “Well, here I am at the emergency room again!” with no context or details. It’s like they want all their friends to immediately comment, “Oh no, are you okay??”. There’s actually a term for that kind of post: vaguebooking.
2. People who post in a local group and ask for recommendations for a good pizza place, or a good vet, or whatever – and they end the post with “… and GO!” like we’re all just waiting at the starting line to provide what they’re asking for.
3. “News” or “life hacks” that are completely fake. I’ve seen so much of this especially recently with the COVID-19 situation. People see something that sounds like a great medical tip, and they don’t bother to check it out or verify, they just click the “Share” button to spread the misinformation to more people. No, sitting in the sauna does not kill the coronavirus.

Fortunately for those kinds of posts, I have one tried and true solution. I just unfollow that person. So we’re still Facebook friends, but I never see anything they post after that. And they can still see what I post. And they have no idea that I have unfollowed them. Quick and easy.

But there’s a different annoyance that cannot be fixed by unfollowing. It’s the animated GIFs in comments.

You probably know what I’m talking about. Someone will create a post in Facebook, like usual. But then someone will reply with a comment that’s just this animated GIF image, like a person clapping their hands, or a cat jumping up and down, or something with lots of movement. And the movement repeats like every 2 seconds, over and over and over. For me, this is incredibly distracting and annoying. Yes, you can click on the moving image itself to make it stop, but there could be a whole barrage of those images in separate replies to the same post, so you have to click on each one individually to make them stop moving.

And guess what – even if you click to make them all stop bouncing around, that same post will probably show up in your Facebook feed in a few hours, and they’re all moving again. It was driving me bonkers. And Facebook does not offer any setting to be able to turn those things off. Yes, you can turn off having video automatically play in a FB post, but that does not apply to these images that are added through the comments.

But recently I found a wonderful solution. It’s a Chrome extension called FB Purity. Now I’m sure if you took a guess you might think that stands for Facebook Purity, right? But I think the app developers were concerned about using the name “Facebook” in the app, so the actual name is Fluff Busting Purity. But everyone knows that the whole purpose of it is to clean up a bunch of junk in Facebook. And it does a LOT more than just what we’re talking about here today.

You can get the Chrome extension here: https://www.fbpurity.com/install.htm (it also works with Firefox and some other browsers).

Just download and install, then the next time you open Facebook, you’ll see the FBP icon at the top:

When you click that, you’ll see a new window with a HUGE variety of options for you to choose from, about how you want Facebook to be displayed. This is what mine looks like:

You might notice some of the choices I’ve made – I have hidden all Sponsored Posts – so on my Facebook I don’t see any ads. I love that! Then, further down the list, I have chosen to always display the items in my News Feed with the Most Recent ones starting at the top. And then you’ll see that I’ve checked “Show Full Date/Time on posts” – so if you see an older post, it doesn’t just say “3 weeks ago”. It will give me the actual date and time it was posted. Not a big deal, just my preference.

So let’s get to wiping out the animated GIFs. Over on the left side, click on the category “Font, Colour and Design”. You’ll see in this section you have all kinds of control over the size and color of the text in Facebook. But when you look way down the list, you’ll see the checkbox for “Hide Animated GIFs”. Just check that and click on Save and Close (on the right).

So that solves that problem. But as you can see, there are MANY other options available for you to tweak how Facebook works and displays on your computer. Play around with FB Purity, and let everyone know in the comments which setting you like the best.

And please note – FB Purity is offered free, but by donation. So you aren’t required to pay anything, but the developer has put a LOT of work into getting this thing working so it would be nice to send over a few dollars or whatever you’re comfortable with.

How to hide all animated GIFs in Facebook comments