Do most trainers understand that we can only open 20 gifts max a day? I’m such a people pleaser and I want to let friends know I’m not ignoring them but it’s not like you can message in the app and I’m scheduling which to open. How do you feel about it?

For the most part, yes, people have figured out that you can only open 20 gifts a day. If you want to make sure no one feels left out though, the limit on how many gifts you can send per day is much higher (like 100 or so). So you can always send out gifts to any friends you weren't able to open gifts from.

I've got 8 friends in total. Those are first world problems. Top that

I think every Trainer understands in theory that you can only open 20 gifts a day. What some Trainers may not understand is why "you" (or "I") don't consider "them" to be your top priority.

Using myself as an example, I've got some "Friends" from other continents specifically to get 7km Eggs with 3,000-10,000+km distances on them for Trading purposes, and it bugs me when I don't have a gift waiting from them when I need it. This is stupid, of course - I've never met these people, I will never meet these people, so why on Earth should I expect them to view me in the same way? I make sure that they have gifts waiting from me to open whenever they want (most of the time), but it's idiotic of me to expect them to know that. It still bugs me, but I understand that this is not a problem with them, with Niantic or anything like that - it's an irrational annoyance that I have to ignore.

Assuming none have had a Friendship Increase that day, most of the time I prioritize my gifts in 3 ways:
1) How close I am to a Friendship Level increase with that person
1a) What level that person is - a level 40 doesn't get the same benefit from a 50,000 XP boost that even a Level 39 would get.
2) How often I raid with that person (taking gyms together isn't something many people do around here)
-No need to send gifts regularly to increase Friendship if I'm raiding with them
3) How regularly they open gifts
-If they hold onto gifts for days at a time, I'll probably only send them a gift if I've got "extra" ones.

I've also kept my Friends list small and manageable (49), and resisted the urge to just add everyone from the Trainer Codes posts, so regularly I either run out of gifts to send (only being able to hold 10 at a time SUCKS, particularly when the drop rate for Gifts seems to be entirely "R"NG, and we all know how Niantic defines "R"...) or I run out of people to send gifts to.

I think most people understanf it if they have friends at least a week or more. When I just started searching for friends, I had a feeling that I have too many gifts. So when they didn't open my gifts immediately, I was annoyed because I couldn't send them another gift. When I put my code onto this site,very soon so many people added me that this is not my concern anymore. I hope that they're in the same position as me, having more friends than they can open gifts from and sending gifts to them from time to time. But there're still a couple of people that send me a new gift immediately after I open the previous and I feel slightly bad when I see the notification.

Making friends on this site is like making friends at the truck-stop. Pretty sure there are no feelings involved.

Good discussion here already, just thought I'd drop my two cents that you can actually communicate it to your friends via your buddy name. Change it to "@giftlimit" or something and anyone who didn't realize there's a limit will not know after they look at your profile.

As someone with a total of 8 "friends" I would imagine most people would not know that. I will also admit I have wondered why someone can not do something as simple as opening a god damn gift. I don't care if they send one to me or not, I just want the friendship bonuses.