About GIFUP

GIFUP started in 2007 as an avatar and animation generator, at a time when every forum signature and MySpace profile wanted something that moved. It produced 1,288,647 animations before the web moved on and the site went quiet.

The domain came back in 2026 to do the same job with current tools. What changed is where the work happens. Browsers can now run a full video encoder by themselves, so your file is read from your disk, processed inside the tab and handed straight back. Nothing is uploaded unless you ask for it: the Get a link button hosts a finished file here so you can paste it elsewhere, and the WhatsApp sticker page can deliver a sticker to your phone, which needs a server by its nature. Both are optional and labelled.

What that changes

A typical online converter is a web page in front of a rack of servers. It has to cap file sizes, put you in a queue, keep your file for an hour or eight, and pay for the machines somehow. None of that applies here. There are no accounts, no size caps and no watermarks, and your video never sits in someone else's storage.

The other side of the deal is that the speed is your computer's speed, and a very large file can exceed what the browser lets a single page hold in memory. We chose that trade on purpose.

What is on the site

Six tools: video to GIF, a compressor, a resizer, cropping, captions and GIF to MP4. Next to them sit pages built around the rules of particular platforms, for Discord emoji and profiles, Slack, Twitch and WhatsApp. Each tool sticks to one job, because most visitors arrive with exactly one job and no wish to learn an editor.

The same tools are packaged as an Android app: the conversion engine ships inside it, so it works without a network connection, saves results to the gallery and accepts a video shared from any other app. Interface in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Ukrainian and Russian.

Under the hood

The encoder is FFmpeg, compiled to WebAssembly by the ffmpeg.wasm project (ffmpeg.wasm 0.12.10 with the unmodified @ffmpeg/core 0.12.6 build, GPL). It is about 10 MB compressed, downloaded once and then kept by your browser. The core runs on a single thread, because the multi-threaded build needs cross-origin isolation headers that break too much else on an ordinary site, so a long clip takes a few seconds rather than a fraction of one. Everything around it, the trimming, cropping, caption drawing and the size-fitting passes, is plain JavaScript on the page.

Who runs it

A small independent project, not a company with a sales team. If something is broken or a tool you need is missing, write to us. Requests are genuinely how the list of tools gets decided.