Imgur Has Made A New GIF Format For The Modern Age

Animated GIFs and the Internet go together like peanut butter and jelly. Whether your Internet browsing habits take you to Reddit, Tumblr, or elsewhere, you likely run into multiple GIFs per day, each expressing a thought or emotion or showing off the best part of a video in wonderful looping fashion. The Internet of today is far different than the Internet that existed when the first GIF was born, of course, and it was only a matter of time before the format we all know and love changed to suit modern needs. Thus was born the GIFV ("jiffy") format.

The new format was created by Imgur, arguably the Internet's most favorite image-hosting website for GIFs and images of all sorts. Says the company, "GIFs are no longer about .GIFs – the culture of the GIF now trumps the file format." Chief among that GIF culture, as it is called, is a desire to show off more content at higher qualities in GIF format.

The new GIFV format, standing for GIF-video and cleverly being pronounced as "jiffy", transforms GIFs into MP4 videos for considerably smaller file sizes. As an example, Imgur showed off an HD looping GIFV (3.4MB) that it says was 50MB before conversion. This is particularly handy for mobile users.

Imgur has made changes so that all uploaded GIFs are automatically converted into GIFV format. Because this format is more efficient, the GIF upload size limit is being changed from 5MB all the way to 50MB. GIFVs shared on social networks will be "fully" animated, and as a matter of principle, all converted GIFs will show a GIFV extension.

SOURCE: Imgur Blog