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.
Tutorial is here: https://niftytoolz.com/nifty-social-media-2-slot-product-view-animator-for-zazzle
Get your bookmarklet here: https://niftytoolz.com/npcp/prod-views-anigif-maker.html
Here's a peak at the options panel as set up for the above:
Enjoy - shout with questions or suggestions 🤪
Wow - how awesome is that!! I can’t wait until the sun goes down and I can try it out. Thank you so much for posting this here! 👌🏽
(oops - peak -> peek!)
I've now added the video to the tutorial page. Watch it instead on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HQub9K14n1A
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.
haha!
Excellent tutorial - thanks a bunch!! 👌🏽😀
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
1) converting 2-slot gifs to MP4 isn't working for me. (I haven't tried converting any made with the Pansci marklet.)
2) 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.
It worked for me too using Firefox on Window 10 and converting with convertio.co - I got all nine images with eight rotating. See https://www.pinterest.com/pin/1133922012418723054/.
I can say your tool makes promoting on Pinterest so much less painful.
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!!
https://sanfrancisco.zone/customizable_elongated_souvenir_coin_pressed_penny_collector_print_cut_sew... (in case you wonder now).
Thanks, @HightonRidley
Lookin' good!
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. 😮
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 despite Pinterest'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.
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. 🤔
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 hope that makes sense!
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. 🙄
Fanci Pansci are bookmarklets for making animations from Zazzle Collections and Zazzle search results pages: https://community.zazzle.com/t5/external-tools-materials/new-free-tool-nifty-fanci-panci-bookmarklet...
Oh wow - total awesomeness!! 😱
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.
Interesting observation:
Perelandrian (Singing Mountains Art - a whimsical symphony of faith, flora and fauna) has created a group board on Pinterest for Zazzle artists to post their creations. You will find it here:
I have posted a bunch of Fanny Packs there (13), some with videos I had created my self and some with Highton Ridley’s tool. Using the laptop none are animated when you look at the Fanny Pack board (unless you click through). But using my iPhone some (four out of 13) are animated (looks really need) and some don’t regardless of how the video was created to post on Pinterest.
On a site note it made me happy that the video (furthest down on the Fanny Pack board) played because I remember the day so fondly when I recorded that footage back in 2016. The good old days, smile (because that marina is now closed). 😢
To sum this post up: I believe now that Pinterest is randomly allowing some videos to be animated (roughly a third perhaps?) and there is not a darn thing we did wrong or can change about that. Again I observed this using an iPhone, on my Window laptop none are animated.
Like you, not a single pin on that group Fanny Pack board is animated for me on my computer (Win 10 using Firefox). I'll check this animation situation out later from my phone.
To sum this post up: I believe now that Pinterest is randomly allowing some videos to be animated (roughly a third perhaps?) and there is not a darn thing we did wrong or can change about that.
I believe you are correct. Pinterest is as convoluted as the US tax code and they're constantly changing the playbook.
I created a new board this morning to do some very methodical testing of gifs vrs mp4s & pin creation methods but after about six or seven pins something unrelated to animation started happening to them which made my efforts useless so I deleted them. Exasperating, but gave me a wild hunch about tiles/descriptions defaulting back to Zazzle's. Next day off I'm going to try to test that theory out but for now, I'm not seeing how video/animated pins are going to attract more pin clicks as it seems they are only randomly, if at all, actually animated on the feed/board views which is where you are competing for interest to get people to actually click your pin. 😜
To your last sentence: Although keep in mind that most folks nowadays don't even use a laptop/desktop anymore. We do in order to design but most of my neighbors only use a phone meaning are using mobile devices to browse the net. And I just tested it in the Pinterest app too: partially animated.
