Imgur To Upgrade GIFs To GIFVs, Smaller And Faster File Format

Well, it’s about time Imgur sped these things up!

The Verge is reporting that Imgur (pronounced “imager”) will be replacing the popular GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) with the new GIFV (Graphics Interface Format Video).

“Let’s get real, the.GIF format is outdated and is not really that great for the modern web anymore,” says Imgur founder Alan Schaaf. “It was created in 1989 and it wasn’t even created for the purpose of animation. What we’re trying to do is keep that same experience almost intact but just make the technology around it much better.”

To that end, Imgur is announcing a new way of handling GIFs. Any GIF files uploaded to Imgur are now automatically converted to MP4 video, compressed, and then displayed just as a standard GIF would be. However, the conversion to MP4 means that GIFs can now be significantly larger and higher quality and the resulting files are still smaller than your average GIF.

“What we found in our testing is that we’re able to reduce the size of these files by about 10 times,” says Schaaf. Imgur provided us with a few examples — the standard GIF file displays much smaller while the GIF-to-MP4 converted version is significantly larger, while the file itself is smaller.

Thanks to that conversion process, Imgur is able to raise the file size limit for GIFs from 5MB to 50MB, allowing users to create bigger and more complex GIFs. Another advantage to the MP4 format is that the GIF will auto play at full speed even as it is loading, so the familiar choppy version of a GIF you’re probably used to seeing as it loads will be a thing of the past.

CNet is reporting that the new format will replace the decades-old GIF format (created in 1987) on social network websites including Imgur, which should eliminate social websites bogging down to almost no speed.

Killing off animated GIFs won’t be easy, though. New file formats arrive — Google hopes people will embrace its WebP format, which includes animation support — but the Web pages already published don’t stop using the old ones. And the retro chic of animated GIF seems to be part of its appeal.

Launched five years ago by Schaaf to improve image sharing for users of the Reddit discussion site, Imgur exploded in popularity to become the 46th most visited site on the Internet, according to analytics site Alexa.

Two years ago, Imgur had 45 million unique visitors in a month and 2.3 billion page views, transferring 4.1 petabytes of data with 33 billion image views. It’s only become more popular since then, reportedly drawing the acquisition interest of Yahoo.

[Image courtesy of ZDNet]