'The Rings of Power star is about to appear in cinemas as the Ophelia to Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet – but she’s determined to be on our screens for decades to come.'
MORFYDD CLARK in HARPER'S BAZAAR UK 📸 by Charlie Clift, March 2026
gifmakers on tumblr put a lot of effort into their gifs, and understandably get quite annoyed when someone steals them and reposts them without credit. it's especially frustrating when the stolen gifs get a ton of notes. we look at it and we go wtf how did this get so many notes when it's all stolen????
then i realised the average tumblr user, especially if they're new, or they've never created gifs or posted anything, or they don't understand how tumblr even works... well how are they gonna know?
this post will cover some of the most obvious signs that a gifset is stolen, including:
gif sizing + placement
gifset colouring, sharpening and style
the tags of the poster
if this post is helpful to you, please reblog to spread awareness!
1. gifset sizing
when a gifmaker is making a gifset, they Generally will make all of the gifs the same size. by "size" i mean dimensions in pixels. all the gifs will generally be uniform in size, and laid out intentionally to fit tumblr's recommended dimensions.
here is an example of one of my gifsets with uniform dimensions:
all of the gifs are the same size, laid out correctly for the recommended dimensions, and are fully visible with no cut-offs, blurriness, etc.
many times when a gifset is stolen, it'll be made up of a random assortment of gifs, stolen from multiple gifsets. the gifs might be all different sizes, and not laid out correctly, with parts cut off at the top or bottom. they might be blurry, compressed or just not "look" right.
here is an example of a gifset with inconsistent dimensions:
now, i used inspect element to see the dimensions, but how can you spot a incorrectly sized gif or inconsistently sized gifset at a glance if you're on mobile?
well, see that gif of sam? see how it's cut off mid-forehead, and just under his collar?
well, when you click on the gif and view it in its entirety, you can see that parts of the gif were cut off by the incorrect placement of a 540px gif in a 268px layout:
generally speaking, a gifmaker is not going to make a 540px gif and then put it side by side with another gif. gifset placement is not accidental. gifmakers know and use the recommended dimensions to ensure their gifsets are high quality and viewed on the dashboard the way they intended.
this is sign #1 that these gifs were not made by the person who posted them.
2. colouring and subtitles
gifmakers will generally try to make all of their gifs similar in colouring, sharpening and style. gifs will be (to the best of our abilities) similar in brightness, vibrance, tone and sharpness. basically, they will be visually consistent.
a stolen gifset will not. for example:
aside from the inconsistent sizing, these gifs are all sharpened and coloured in vastly different ways. this is admittedly something a gifmaker is more likely to notice, given our experience, but anyone can take a second to just look and see if the gifs look like they were all made by the same person. if they don't, it's likely a stolen gifset.
sidenote: subtitles are also another tell. i generally use the same font, font size, boldness, subtitle colour etc across all of my individual gifs and in all of my gifsets. if one gif has yellow subtitles in arial font, and the other has white subtitles in times new roman, chances are those are stolen gifs.
3. the tags of the poster
this is probably the FASTEST and EASIEST way to tell if a gifset is stolen, and requires some understanding of what tags are and why we use them on tumblr. here is a brief guide for tagging if you need one!
what you need to know is this:
gifmakers often use [media]edit tags to make it easier for people to find their gifsets in a sea of xreader fanfic and text posts, as well as user[tags] to increase reach
gifmakers will usually have a tag specifically for their gifsets (mine is #originals, some people use a #*, some people use their name like #[name]gifs or #mygifs). the purpose of that tag is to make it easy to find the gifsets we've made on our blogs
here is an example of a genuine gifmaker's tags:
people who steal gifs generally aren't aware of the tagging conventions gifmakers use to catalogue their gifs & increase reach, so they won't include them. they might even say outright that the gifs are stolen.
some examples of stolen gifset tags:
this one isn't an exact science. a lot of newer gifmakers aren't aware of the [media]edit tags, or other well-established tagging conventions, and sometimes gifmakers don't have a unique gifmaker tag. HOWEVER, most do and, when paired with looking at the sizing, colouring, sharpening and overall consistency of the gifs, this is usually a good way to sus out if a gifset you aren't sure about is stolen/reposted.
that's it! i hope this was helpful, and that you are better equipped now to figure out if a gifset was actually made by the person posting it!
if this was helpful to you in any way PLEASE reblog, so more people can learn how to pick a genuine gifset from a stolen one. plus i spent a lot of time on this and i would appreciate it okay thanks byeeee
"There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death. Conjuring spirits from the past and the future."
SINNERS (2025) dir. Ryan Coogler
Hi, sorry if this is an unwelcome question, but do you have any tips you can offer on sharpening 2d animated things? I always love yours. <3
aww hi~
Yeah, so that's actually something I was struggling a little bit at first as well (as you may know, I'm an avid sharpener for 3D/live action stuff, which I had to majorly scale back for 2D things) so I definitely get the frustration and am happy to help if I can!
For starters, one thing I find useful is, as always, download the 1080p quality footage whenever you can — what's really great about 2D stuff is that they usually don't have much gradient shading, which keeps the file sizes down regardless of the quality.
So, when you resize your gif, it'll already make it pretty sharp, in some cases I will actually just leave it at that (for example, this Regular Show gifset was only coloured and not sharpened at all) but for stuff like Bob's Burgers which is all smooth lines and big blocks of colour, I usually do some very soft sharpening.
As you may know, I always work in timeline mode, so I sharpen straight from the Filter -> Sharpen -> Smart Sharpen menu and I usually add two separate filters with different settings.
Here are some of the settings I usually use for those two filters:
and then by double clicking the little toggles on the right side of the filters, you can adjust the opacity; I usually go anywhere between 10-60%, but honestly that's just personal preference at this point.
I hope this was helpful and feel free to shoot me another ask if you have any more questions <3
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