About birthday.video

A birthday video is one of the nicest things you can send someone, and making one is often more painful than it should be. The apps that do it well tend to want an account before you can save, a subscription before the watermark goes, and your family photos on their servers before anything happens at all. Usually you are doing it the night before, on your phone, with a dozen photos and a song in mind. birthday.video was built for exactly that moment: open a page, make the video, send it.

What you can make

• An animated card with their name, their age and a message from you.
• A happy birthday GIF with their name on it, for the group chat or a comment.
• A slideshow of photos and clips through the years, under a Happy Birthday tune.
• Wishes from a whole group: one short clip from each friend, collected by you.
• Milestones from a first birthday to an eightieth and beyond, with the number up front.
• Funny and belated cards, video messages, party invitations and cards in memory.
• Every one in the shape it needs: a 9:16 Story, a 4:5 post, a square, or 16:9 for the TV.

How it works

The site is a static web page with an editor inside it. When you add photos, clips or a song, your browser reads them straight from your phone or computer. The templates are drawn and animated by your browser, and when you export, it encodes the frames and the sound into an MP4 with the WebCodecs API, or the frames into a GIF, on your device. The music menu offers our own arrangements of the Happy Birthday tune, whose melody has been in the public domain for years; we made the arrangements for this site, so you can use them in your video, post it anywhere, or download a tune on its own. Nothing is sent to a server along the way, which is why there is nothing to sign up for and nothing to wait for in a queue. Your project is saved in the browser as you go, so a closed tab doesn’t lose the work.

What we promise

• Your photos, clips, music and words are never uploaded.
• It is free, with no watermark, no account and no trial.
• No ads. Analytics only count visits and which templates and features are used, and the one cookie-based service can be switched off in Cookie settings on any page.
• The guides describe other apps honestly, built-in options first, checked against each maker’s own help pages.

What it doesn’t do

There is no shared project that friends can upload to, because nothing is uploaded: one person collects the clips and adds them. Apart from our Happy Birthday arrangements, the music has to be a file you already have, and the name appears on screen rather than being sung. There is no generative AI. The editor doesn’t film with your camera or post to social networks for you; you record on your phone as usual, and send or post the finished video yourself.

birthday.video is an independent, self-funded project. How data is handled is set out in the privacy policy, and you can reach us through the contact page.