Video to GIF

How to use the Video to GIF

1. Choose or drag in a video. It opens in the player on this page.
2. Drag the blue handles on the timeline, type exact times, or play the video and use Start at current frame / End at current frame. Keep it to 20 seconds or less.
3. Pick frames per second and width. 10 fps at 480 px is a good balance; lower either one for a smaller file.
4. Click Create GIF and wait for the progress bar. The tool steps through the video frame by frame.
5. Check the preview and click Download GIF.

How it works

The tool seeks the video to each frame time (start, start + 1/fps, start + 2/fps …), draws that frame onto a hidden canvas at the width you chose, and reads back the pixels. GIF images can hold at most 256 colors, so each frame is reduced to a palette with a color-quantization step and every pixel is mapped to its nearest palette color. The frames are then compressed with LZW, the method the GIF format uses, by the open-source gifenc library (MIT license) running in your browser.

The number of frames is the clip length × frames per second, so a 4-second clip at 10 fps has 40 frames. GIF stores frame timing in hundredths of a second, so at 15 fps the delays alternate between 6 and 7 hundredths to keep the total length correct. Per frame palettes give the most accurate colors; a shared palette, built from frames sampled across the clip, avoids colors shimmering between frames and can make the file a bit smaller.

GIF is an old format and it is not efficient for video: a few seconds can easily be several megabytes. File size grows with width × height × number of frames, and busy or noisy footage compresses worse than flat graphics. Example: 3 seconds at 10 fps and 480 px wide is 30 frames and is often 1–4 MB. Halving the width to 240 px usually cuts the size by about three quarters. There is no sound in a GIF.

Frequently asked questions

Which videos can I use?
Any video your browser can play: MP4 (H.264) and WebM in Chrome, Edge and Firefox, and MP4/MOV in Safari. Large files are fine because the video is played from your device, not loaded into memory all at once.

Why is the GIF limited to 20 seconds?
GIF files get very large very quickly, and building one keeps every frame in memory. Twenty seconds at moderate settings is already hundreds of frames, which phones in particular struggle with.

How do I make the GIF smaller?
Shorten the clip, lower the frames per second, choose a smaller width, or use fewer colors. Width has the biggest effect because the pixel count grows with its square.

Why do the colors look a bit grainy?
GIF can only show 256 colors per frame, so smooth gradients such as skies or skin tones get reduced to bands. That is a limit of the format itself.

Is my video uploaded?
No. The video is played and converted inside your browser. Only the GIF encoder code is downloaded from a public CDN; your file is never sent anywhere.