The Gif format has been around since the late 80’s, now used extensively online for sharing animated clips, which is ironic given that the format wasn’t even intended to be used for animation. There are many issues and glitches that plague the out of date format, but until now there hasn’t been a suitable replacement, or at least none that have been widely adopted.
Imgur are one of the biggest image hosters around, used by people on forums, reddit and other sites to upload and quickly share images with each other. Now they’re taking the humble .gif and are replacing them ALL with Project GIFV; effectively Gif Video.
The upload limit on Imgur has been increased to a whopping 50MB, which once would have output a file of the same size, but now a 50MB Gif will be automatically converted by the Imgur computers and it’ll spit out a 3.4MB GIFV file that looks and behaves just like a gif, but it’ll load faster, smoother, have better image quality and a significantly reduced file size, which is effective witchcraft.
- Massively Increased Upload Limits: With the efficiencies introduced by MP4, Imgur is increasing its traditional GIF upload limit of 5MB by an order of magnitude to 50MB. This opens the door to massive improvements in quality. (Note: Original files over 20MB will not be available after upload)
- Optimized for Social Channels: Uploads to Imgur will now fully animate on channels like Twitter and Facebook, allowing for the sharing of the full GIF experience throughout the social web.
- The .GIFV Extension: With all these improvements, Imgur will now denote converted MP4s with a “.gifv” extension. The intention is to signal to users throughout the Internet that these links will feature a GIF experience that incorporates all the current and future enhancements made through Project GIFV. Imgur plans to submit an accompanying specification to relevant standards organizations before the end of the year.
The .gif files are converted to MP4 video, but then spits them back out in a gif style format that means users won’t know anything has changed; aside from the fact they load fast, look incredible and are just all round better! The now 27 year old image format has been reborn. Check out these demos to see for yourself.
Thank you Imgur for providing us with this information.
