What GlaCat is: a free, redirect-ad-free, privacy-first URL shortener

GlaCat is a free URL shortening and image/video sharing service. Short links always redirect straight through with a 302 and no ad interstitial; click statistics are anonymised by hashing and no visitor IP address is stored in plaintext; and link analytics — usually a paid feature elsewhere — are included.

What it does

Short links: no account needed. Set a lifetime (from one minute, and permanent without signing in), a view limit, an access password, and separate iOS / Android destinations for device-based routing.
Image and video sharing: images up to 80MB each, multiple images merged into a single album link; video up to 500MB. Downloads are off by default.
Link analytics: signed-in users get 30-day click trends, unique visitors, countries, referrers, devices, browsers, operating systems and hourly distribution for every link, exportable as CSV or Excel.
Bulk creation: URL links can be imported in bulk from a CSV or XLSX template.

How data is handled

Click statistics never store a visitor IP address in plaintext. "Unique visitors" is computed by de-duplicating a salted one-way hash of IP and User-Agent; the hash cannot be reversed back to an address. The source IP of a file upload is recorded, used only to prevent abuse and to cooperate with law enforcement where required, and this is stated explicitly in the privacy policy.

Visitors clicking a short link never load any third-party analytics script: the redirect is performed directly by the server without rendering a page, so their browsing is never exposed to third parties. The GlaCat website itself — the pages where links are created — does use Google Analytics to understand overall traffic. These are two separate things, and both are disclosed in the privacy policy.

Full retention periods, deletion procedures and user rights are set out in the privacy policy.

Interface languages

The interface is available in Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Russian and Hindi. Your browser language is detected on first visit, and you can switch manually from the navigation bar at any time.