imgur CEO Alan Schaaf

Introduced in 1987 by CompuServe, the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is still alive, because it allows users to create animated images. GIF became part of the Internet culture and is now widely available, some might say ubiquitous, even on photo forums.

Later in 1989, the company introduced the world a updated version of the standard, 89a, that lets users play a series of still frames in the sequence and the famous animated GIF-images were born.

Nevertheless, GIF and animated images have a major problem. They consume lots of disk space and bandwidth where shared via social networks. As the years passed, many developers from other companies have tried to create an alternative to this format, but all attempts failed and did not get much popularity.

Imgur is about to change that

Imgur, one of the biggest image sharing sites on the Internet promises to make micro revolution and allowing you to transform long and heavy animation in small and lightweight files that can be easily viewed on a smartphone. The sharing site last week announced a new initiative called Project GIFV that it says is reimagining the looping GIF video with all the richness it deserves as a key piece of Internet culture.

What makes these new GIF files so special? The company demonstrates a 50 MB GIF file and converted that to 3.4 MB file in the new format, which enables it to still look good and load quickly. The new format (.GIFV Extension) allows you to reduce the size of animated file 14 times.

“The cornerstone of Project GIFV is a platform-wide upgrade to automatically convert uploaded GIF files on the fly into the MP4 video format,” Imgur writes. “The converted MP4s are significantly smaller than their equivalent GIFs, which allows them to load at lightning-fast speeds with better quality. By lowering bandwidth consumption, the change also optimizes Imgur for users on mobile. […] Beyond performance increases, the core experience will not change: Project GIFV implements MP4 video in a way that looks and behaves exactly like a GIF.”

Imgur will now denote converted MP4s with a “.gifv” extension. The intention is to signal to users that these links will feature a GIF experience that incorporates all the current and future enhancements made through Project GIFV. The company is planning to submit relevant specifications to standards organizations before the end of the year.

New way to look at social networks

The .GIF format is outdated and is not really that great for the modern web anymore. On that note, the company’s new project is reimagining the looping GIF video with all the richness it deserves as a key piece of Internet culture.

As stated in the company’s blog, the new format GIFV should work well in social networks such as Twitter and Facebook and after adding them, it will be recorded as a video. In the near future, Imgur promises to provide a format specification for large organizations and companies to rapidly deploy sites and extensive use of the world wide web.

By the way, if a user tries to save the new format in the browser, the browser prompts to save it as .mp4. This tells us that while some sites will not allow this format to insert a simple image that will cause a little trouble for web-designers and end users.

Imgur isn’t the only one embracing MP4s over the traditional GIF format. A few months back Twitter announced that it would start accepting GIF uploads straight up on its platform, rather than via a link from Giphy.