About Amara Software

Amara Software is a small set of free tools for making animated things for the web: GIFs, slideshows, banners, scrolling tickers, animated photos, menus and buttons. Everything runs inside your browser. There is no upload, no account and nothing to install.

Where the name comes from

From 2004 to around 2016 this domain was the home of the original Amara Software, a maker of small Windows programs for Adobe Flash: the Flash Slideshow Builder, the Menu and Button Builder, the Intro and Banner Builder, the News Ticker and the Photo Animation Software. They were listed on download portals such as CNET, Softonic and FileHippo, and many websites of that era carried an Amara ticker or slideshow.

Adobe switched off the Flash Player at the end of 2020, and the programs stopped being useful. The needs behind them did not: people still want a quick slideshow for a family event, a banner for a shop, a scrolling line of text on a website, or a photo that moves a little. So the line continues here, rebuilt from scratch for the browser, exporting the formats people actually use today: GIF, MP4 and WebM, and plain HTML and CSS.

We are not the original company and do not claim to be. We took the name forward because thousands of pages still link to it and because the idea behind it, small tools that do one thing well, is worth keeping.

How the tools work

Each tool uses capabilities that modern browsers already have: the canvas for drawing, WebCodecs and the MediaRecorder API for video, and a small GIF encoder that runs on your machine. Your images and videos are read by your browser and never sent anywhere. Close the tab and nothing remains.

The SWF Player uses Ruffle, an open-source Flash Player emulator, which we host ourselves. It plays most content written in ActionScript 1 and 2 and a growing share of ActionScript 3.

Languages

The site is available in English and German. The German version is written separately, not machine-translated.

Contact

Questions, bug reports and ideas are welcome. You can reach us through the contact page.