8 Tumblr Limitations You Probably Don’t Know

We’ve already covered some Tumblr tips and tricks that can help you out with your blogging experience. On top of that, we featured a few tools and extensions to get the most of out Tumblr. But we bet you didn’t know that there are limitations as to what you can do on Tumblr, for instance, you can only post a certain number of posts per day. Once you hit that limit, then you’d have to wait until the next day to continue posting.

Tumblr lists some of these limitations on its Help page, but there are some that are less than official. In this post, we’ll uncover some of these limits that range from the tags you can track and fan mail you can send. Regardless of whether you are a potential power Tumblr user or a sporadic one at best, here are some of the things you probably don’t know about using Tumblr.

1. Can’t Go Private With Primary Blogs

Limitation – There’s a saying on the Internet that what is on the Internet stays on the Internet. Even if you delete it, someone might have seen and saved the screenshot, and may resurrect it. This holds true on Tumblr when you post on your primary blog as you cannot privatise its contents – everything is made public. Besides that, multiple authors cannot contribute posts to your primary blog.

What you can do – Here is when Tumblr’s secondary blogs shine. Secondary blogs allow you to receive contribution from more than one author, and you can add password protection to its content. There’s even a function that allows you to set certain posts as private before posting it. Best of all, although you are limited to just one primary blog per URL, there is no limit to how many secondary blogs you can own. However, you can only create 10 per day (which is more than you need, really).

2. Limited To 250 Posts/Day

Limitation – You can never have too many posts on your Tumblr blog. Well, not in a day anyway. You can only post a total of 250 posts daily. This includes reblogs, and yes, the number applies to the cumulative posts on both your primary and secondary blogs. Tumblr will reset the post limit only when it hits 12 midnight Eastern Time, as its headquarters is based in New York.

What you can do – If for some reason, you hit the 250 limit, you can do one of two things: wait until Tumblr resets itself or you can queue your posts for the following day. The Queue will not be posted on the same day if you’ve hit your daily post limit (see below), so make sure to give it a time for the following day, or your post may be lost. If you need to check how many posts you have left, enter your Tumblr username at Post Limit Checker. The tool also tells you the time left until the next reset.

3. Queue Only 50 Posts/Day

Limitation – Queueing posts is an artform by itself. You’d want to stagger posts so as to not overwhelm your followers. In fact, you can queue and publish up to 50 posts in the same day. This is of course included in the 250 posts-per-day limit but if you are going to be away for a while, you can actually queue up to 300 posts to be released across several days.

What you can do – Note that if you somehow exceeded the 250 limit but your queue is still ongoing, you’ll lose the remaining posts scheduled for the day. Instead of trying to beat the Queue limit, you can save your posts as Drafts. Once your Queue count is under the limit again, you can move those drafts to Queue.

4. Optimum-Res At 500×750 pixels

Limitation – Whether they come in a post of their own or in a photoset, there is an optimum size for photos to display nicely. The normal photo size on a dashboard is 500 x 750 pixels and the maximum size you can upload a photo is 1280 x 1290 pixels. Photos bigger than 500 x 750 will be viewed in a lightbox when clicked.

What you can do – If you share photos heavily on Tumblr, it is obvious to keep the photo sizes to the recommended 500 x 750 pixels so your photos won’t be scaled down. Also note that from the 250 posts-per-day limit, 150 of those can be photo posts. If you have any trouble uploading photos, refer here for troubleshooting options. This blog post provides a comprehensive guide to the various photo sizes on Tumblr.

5. Heavy GIFs Can’t Move

Limitation – Moving on to GIFs; GIFs maketh Tumblr as you can find all sorts of GIFs here along with users who specialize in making them. If however you come across a GIF that doesn’t quite work properly, it is because the file size allowed has been exceeded. If a GIF is more than 2MB, Tumblr will turn the first frame of the GIF into a static image.

What you can do – If you love making GIFs, you will do well to heed the size limits. The maximum GIF size was recently bumped up from 1MB to 1.75MB and within 500 pixels (which is good news as most GIF makers attest to their 500 pixels GIFs having better quality). If your GIF exceeds the size limit, try saving the post in drafts first to see if the animation loads. If it doesn’t, then you need to take some time to reduce the file size to workable limits.

6. More Than 5 Tags Lead To Phantom Tags

Limitation – Tags, as most of you would know, serve to keep track of things and function as a way to discover new content. If an original post has more than five tags, only the first five tags are searchable from the dashboard. Of course, with Tumblr’s new search, the sixth tag and beyond are searchable, unless you are using the old tag page.

What you can do – This tip is for the chronic tag commenters. If you want others to search for your post, you should hold off your comments until after the fifth tag – tag wisely if you want your post to be found. The ‘phantom’ tag phenomenon does not affect searching the tag from inside your blog. For a better way of searching tags, type http://username.tumblr.com/tagged/insert-tag/.

7. Can Track Only 20 Tags

Limitation – When it comes to tracking tags, some users track certain tags to keep up with new content. The tracked tags will show you how many new posts are posted with that tag since the last time you’ve checked. Note that reblogged posts don’t get tracked and if you are tracking more than 20 tags, then you won’t get to see the number of new posts that carry your tracked tag.

What you can do – Obviously, you should just track 20 tags for tag tracking to be effective. Do some house-keeping by untracking tags that no longer interest you, or track selectively. However, if you couldn’t care less about the post count, you may track all the tags you want.

8. Ask 10 Questions/Hour

Limitation – Mostly Tumblr users communicate through ‘Ask’. For ‘Ask’ to work, it has to be enabled and you can have the option of enabling anonymous asks. Though when someone asks anonymously, the recipient can only reply publicly. Possibly to reduce spam, you can ask only 10 questions per hour (of which 5 can be anonymous). You will also have to adhere to a character limit of 500 characters.

What you can do – If you’ve used up your Ask quota, you can use the alternative method of communication: Fan Mail. Fan Mail is the official messaging function on Tumblr. In fact, your message can be as long as you want, and you can even send links to others. There is one slight setback, however. You can only send Fan Mail after you’ve been following a user for at least 48 hours. But once you’ve past that limitation, you can send Fan Mail up to 500 times a day.