Here’s a neat trick involving animated gifs and the iPhone. If you send an animated gif via text message to another iPhone, the animation will be viewable right inside the Messages app. Suddenly seeing an animated photo where you usually see text messages has a funny and surprising effect.

To send an animated gif via text message, you send it like you would a photo. In Messages, tap the camera icon in the bottom left of the compose message view:

Then tap Choose Existing, then find the animated gif in your Photos app. Then send away!

Of course, you must first save an animated gif to your iPhone. You can save animated gifs right inside your iPhone’s browser by simply holding your finger down on the gif, then tapping Save Image from the pop-up menu.

You can try saving/sending a gif using any of the ones I’ve picked below. Please note that you can’t view the animated part of an animated gif in the iPhone’s Photos app—it will only show a single frame from the animation, but the gif will indeed be animated in the Messages app.

Hat tip to Jeff Richardson over at iPhone JD, who inspired this tip via his review of an app call Stick Text that makes it a snap to send funny animated gifs of stick men.