1-click magic to get an animation for social from the views on a product page. You can then polish it with the options panel. Vertical and horizontal animations to suit your different social channels.
Cool, I’ll watch it in a bit. Will be the last thing I’ll do tonight. I would have signed up as well but my cat was super annoying (walking constantly over the keyboard) so it will have to wait until tomorrow night, lol.
Another great addition to your bookmarklets. (I like to call them Niftymarklets. )
But I am struggling with converting the resulting .gif to .mp4.
I used this product to try it and chose #2 for vertical w/ animated frame on bottom.
I right-clicked and saved the resulting .gif.
I then used three different means to convert it to MP4. Convertio.com, Ezgif.com, and Gif2mp4 which is a simple executable you can download from SourceForge. (They all produced 16 seconds vids with roughly the same small byte size though Convertio’s was considerably higher.)
Playing the mp4s locally on my computer in both VLC and Windows Media Player, none of them worked right in either. Although they all showed a 16 second length, they stalled out on the 5th picture at 9-10 seconds and wouldn’t animate past that. Even moving the slider manually past that point, still just the same still frame after that. I uploaded them to my private testing board on Pinterest anyway
They don’t work right there either. None of them play on the main board page. When I click to open the pin, the one from Ezgif plays but the other two don’t even though if I mouse-over the bottom of the image it shows player controls that don’t do anything. Then I uploaded the original gif from Nifty and that doesn’t play even when you click to view the pin. You have to mouse down and click the “view image” button on the pin and then it opens full-screen and plays. Which is weird because the other Nifty gifs I pinned when trying the Pansci marklet for Collections animate when you open the pin, you don’t have to do the extra step of “view image” button. I just made another pin using the Pansci marklet .gif and it still is animating when you click to open the pin. For me I was OK with skipping converting to MP4 and just having the GIF pin animate after someone clicks on it, but that’s not happening with this new 2-slot marklet, they’re only animating if I go the additional step of clicking the “view image” button that appears at bottom of pin image when you move your mouse over it.
Pinterest is so confusing that’s why I don’t do much promoting, it’s too time consuming to figure out each time what they want, and when I do make notes about what worked, next time I go to pin something they’ve changed something again. Anyway, this is delving into a Pinterest rant which is outside your scope so the summary is
converting 2-slot gifs to MP4 isn’t working for me. (I haven’t tried converting any made with the Pansci marklet.)
2-slot gifs aren’t animating when you open a pin like the Pansci ones do
Thanks once more for your detailed feedback, @ColsCreations
I went to your product page and made the same animation as you and converted to mp4 with convertio. All went well, the mp4 plays all the way to the end (all 8 images, 16 seconds) and the pin I created for it seems fine to me as well: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/332562753751480640
How strange that your experience is so different (I’m on a Mac)
I’m just done with testing the tool as well. I have used it on one of my own listings with five pictures because it had only four views and could definitely use some more exposure. I posted it on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/1133922012418721610/) and it all went well. I converted the file using convertio.co. I’m on Firefox on Window 10.
I will try Col’s listing after a coffee break, lol.
I have been mirroring some of my Zazzle listings on my own site(s) because I thought it will give me an other angle to promote my fairly new store - little did I know that soon after a cute little hamster would peek around the corner, smile. But I’m so excited now because Nifty will be making my pages so much more effective and attractive with basically almost no additional effort coming from my site. I love it!!
Both of yours play automatically for me when I open the Pin link. But they don’t play on the main board/feed view and I’m finding very few things that do despitePinterest’s help page saying “Video Pins play on your desktop when at least 50% of the video Pin is on the screen.”
This is @MOM 's page and I can see from the little bubbles with times in them that these are all videos. But none of them animate regardless of how I scroll the page.
Same thing for @HightonRidley 's page, not a single one plays.
On my own page, I have three videos, all made in Canva and manually pinned. But the only one that is animated on this page is the Phantasmagoria pillow one, which oddly doesn’t have a little time bubble on it identifying it as a video.
If I scroll my home feed, the occasional random pin is animated and like my pillow, they are ones with no bubble timer on them. Nothing with the bubble time indicating it’s a video pin animate unless I click to actually open the pin.
Most of my confusion here lies, I think, in not knowing what normal/expected behavior is here. Are video pins animating in the feed/board views for others? I thought the purpose of converting the Nifty .gifs to .mp4’s was so that they would be animated on the feed/boards and thus attract more attention & actual pin clicks. But if people are not seeing them animated, then I don’t want to spend anymore time figuring out why they aren’t converting smoothly for me as the original .gifs works the same way - only animate if you open the pin.
Thanks for sharing that! I was of a one-track mind here thinking of these in terms of only promoting on social media. DUH to me for not thinking I can use these on my own pages, too.
Maybe I misunderstood but I gathered from @HightonRidley that you couldn’t add an animated GIF to Pinterest? Maybe your pillow pin is an AVI file? I will test this out tonight once the sun is down. I used to create so much in Flash (websites mostly) but I never had a Mac and didn’t realize you couldn’t see it with a Mac so it made sense to retire that. I’m so new to Pinterest I didn’t realize the videos should play automatically. Hmm.
I wish I had the definitive answer for you @ColsCreations but I don’t think there is one. When I view my Created section, one or two of my mp4 animations play without viewing their actual pin by clicking it. Sometimes the ones that do this are different. To see any of the rest animate, you have to click the pin.
My conclusion is that it’s Pinterest making the decisions as to what animates in the feed display.
Hopefully this will clear things up. When you make a pin by hand, uploading an animated gif from your desktop results in a pin that doesn’t animate however you look at it.
The advantage in making the pin manually like above is that the pin goes into your _ Created _ section where, for some reason, Pinterest gives it much more exposure. That’s why you need to convert the gif to an mp4 because that way, it will animate.
If a Pinterest button is used to make a Pin with an animated gif (behind the scenes, Pinterest buttons use an api tech thingy to make pins) then the pin will animate when you click to view it BUT it will go into your _ Saved _ section where it gets only a little exposure in comparison.
Obviously the increased exposure gained by having them in your _ Created _ section vastly outweighs the convenience of having all the pin-making work done by the Pinterest button.
I do intend occasionally to use the Pansci bookmarklet, which uses a Pinterest button and hence puts the animating Pin into the Saved section, but mostly I’ll use Fansci (or this new 2-SlotPVA) and convert my animated gifs to mp4 and then create the pins by hand to get them into my Created section.
I never ever heard of Pansci, Fansci etc. but I’m learning mountains in just a day from you - thank you so much!! I also wanted to compliment you on your extensive documentation on your website - I made my purchase in confidence without even reading it all first. I have purchased to many tools with no support documentation in the past.