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Piggybacking off Scifi StackExchange

The Gfycat service for gifs is being shutdown.

The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com

At the time of writing, there are 23 posts that have links to Gfycat. While going through some of the posts, some of the links (like this one) are already dead. So these need to either be removed, or some how retrieved through webarchives.

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  • Oh, good. I hated that website for a while already, because it kept turning random links that had been used for a while into forwards to a porn website.
    – Fabian Röling
    Jul 12 at 6:26
  • @FabianRöling Yep, all Gfycat media deemed NSFW have been moved to another site. Non-NSFW media should still be at Gfycat until September.
    – galacticninja
    Jul 18 at 7:01
  • Nope, not just that at all, links that used to lead to completely normal GIFs on any topic turned into porn links. Going through top posts of all time on any subreddit is a mine field, because you never know which Gfycat links actually contain what the post title says.
    – Fabian Röling
    Jul 18 at 12:34

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I have been reuploading some of the Gfycat GIFs to SE Imgur on SF&F, Arqade, and Anime & Manga.

Here's what I found out:

For those Gfycat links that are GIFs (URLs that end with .gif) and for some Gfycat MP4 video links, even if the original Gfycat link is broken, there are “size restricted” GIF versions available at these URL formats:

  • https://thumbs.gfycat.com/AdjectiveAdjectiveAnimal-size_restricted.gif
  • https://thumbs.gfycat.com/AdjectiveAdjectiveAnimal-max-1mb.gif

Note: Pay attention to the letter case in the URLs. (This is important for the GIF URLs but not for MP4 video URLs.) The first letters of the two adjectives and the animal name in the GIF identifier in the URL must be capitalized, e.g., "AdjectiveAdjectiveAnimal", or else the link will not work.

For example, in this post, https://giant.gfycat.com/ImpureBrokenBobolink.gif is broken, but there is still a GIF at https://thumbs.gfycat.com/ImpureBrokenBobolink-size_restricted.gif, which I reuploaded to SE Imgur. It also has another GIF version at https://thumbs.gfycat.com/ImpureBrokenBobolink-max-1mb.gif, which is of a much lower resolution than the "size_restricted" version.

Check if a broken Gfycat link is available as a GIF in the above URL formats first. Also, note that many Gfycat links in Arqade are MP4 videos that don’t have GIF versions. For videos, you’ll need to use a tool such as Adobe Express (requires you to log in to an account; account creation is free) or Ezgif to convert them to GIF format before uploading them to SE Imgur, which doesn’t support videos. You can download Gfycat videos using yt-dlp.

Note that SE Imgur has a 2 MiB file size limit. If the GIF is larger than 2 MiB, you need to reduce its file size by doing one or more of the following before uploading to SE Imgur: lossy GIF compression, resizing it to have a lower resolution, reducing its color depth to 128 or even 64, etc. You can use Gifsicle or a similar online tool for this purpose.

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    Thanks for all your hard work on updating these links (and across on multiple sites)!
    – Wondercricket
    Jul 13 at 20:52

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