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Per a notice on their main page:

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

There are only a few (6) posts that have links to gfycat, but one of them has a crazy number (29) of them, and I'm not going to touch it. Note that some of the links are already broken, and will likely simply have to be removed.

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The only post with Gfycat links that still needs fixing is this one: How powerful is Twilight Sparkle? The rest have been fixed as of 2023-07-15.

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. Note that many Gfycat links in SF&F are MP4 videos that don’t have GIF versions; most are in this post: How powerful is Twilight Sparkle? For videos, you’ll need to use a tool 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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    If you remove the "giant" subdomain it also works: gfycat.com/ImpureBrokenBobolink.gif
    – fez
    Jul 5 at 15:29
  • @fez Yes, however, that's the video version, which can't be uploaded to SE Imgur.
    – galacticninja
    Jul 5 at 15:34
  • Can I downloa gifs from gfycat if I didn't upload them? For example, this one from one of the posts linked to in the comment/ If I right click and save as on the gif it tries to download it as mp4 video, and I don't see any other download button on the page
    – user13267
    Jul 6 at 15:48
  • @user13267 I can't seem to find a GIF version for that one. If I do, I will update my answer.
    – galacticninja
    Jul 6 at 15:59
  • I checked out another one and this is an mp4 as well. Are all of them mp4's or are some gifs and some mp4?
    – user13267
    Jul 6 at 16:15
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    @user13267 I believe some are GIFs and some are MP4 videos. GIFs always have MP4 versions, but not vice-versa.
    – galacticninja
    Jul 6 at 16:20
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    I've just deleted the one that was in my answer. It stands just fine without it
    – Valorum
    Jul 6 at 17:13
  • "I have been reuploading some of the Gfycat GIFs" How? It refuses whatever links I try.
    – Laurel
    Jul 8 at 1:25
  • @Laurel I mean Gfycat GIFs, as opposed to Gfycat MP4 videos. Some Gfycat MP4 videos don't have GIF versions. In those cases, the re-upload to SE Imgur will be more complicated since you'll have to convert them to GIFs first.
    – galacticninja
    Jul 8 at 7:31
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    Anime.SE mod here, thanks for the heads-up and edits :)
    – Andrew T.
    Jul 13 at 10:24

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