I think using direct links is a better idea. This allows you to open photos in Lemmy without going to another site.
but they aren't my pictures. why I link to them instead. to make them open in lemmy it's a few extra steps and I'm lazy. any tips on getting gifs to work here?
Do you mean gif images from Mastodon? These images are in mp4 format and are essentially videos. Video is not displayed in Jerboa, Voyager and web interface.
So you will have to convert these videos into real gif format.
She looks like she could be my cats sister!