Video to GIF
Trim a clip, or line up a set of pictures, and get an animated GIF sized for chat or a web page. It is made on this device; the file is never uploaded.
One video, or several pictures (each picture becomes a frame).
Trim
Frames
Drag a row to reorder, or use ↑ ↓. Each picture shows for its own delay.
GIF settings
Crop
Plays
Make and download
Output: –
Frames: –
Estimated size: –
No sound. A GIF is pictures only, so the audio is dropped. Each frame is reduced to its own best 256 colours.
Privacy: the video and pictures are turned into a GIF in your browser and never uploaded. Frames are read from the video with the browser's own player and canvas, and encoded by a script running on this page. Nothing is kept after you close the tab, and it works in airplane mode once the page has loaded.
How to turn a video into a GIF
- Open the clip. Tap Choose a video or pictures or drop a file on the box. Anything this browser can play works: MP4 (H.264), WebM, and MOV where supported.
- Trim it. Drag the two handles under the video, or type the start and end in seconds (0.1 s steps). Play the selection shows exactly what will go in. The limit is 15 seconds; tick Allow up to 60 s for longer.
- Choose frame rate and width. 10 fps at 480 px is a good default for chat. Use 15 to 24 fps for smooth motion, 320 px to keep the file small, or crop to square or 4:5 for a feed.
- Pick how it plays. Speed from 0.25× (slow motion) to 4× (time-lapse), loop forever or once, reverse, or boomerang, which plays forward and then back without showing the turning-point frames twice.
- Check the estimate, then make it. The size estimate is worked out from one real frame before anything is encoded. Press Make GIF, watch the progress (Cancel stops it), then Download GIF; the final size is shown.
What it cannot do
- 256 colours per frame. That is the GIF format's limit, so smooth gradients (sky, skin, shadows) show visible bands and fine noise turns blotchy. Screen recordings, cartoons and flat colours look much better than dim, grainy footage.
- Long or wide clips make big files. Every frame is stored as a full picture: 10 s at 640 × 360 and 15 fps is 150 frames and can pass 15 MB, where an MP4 of the same clip is under 2 MB. The estimate says so before you encode; lower the width or frame rate, or shorten the clip.
- iPhone HEVC videos open only where the browser plays HEVC. iPhones record High Efficiency (HEVC/H.265) .mov files by default. Safari on iPhone, iPad and Mac plays them; Chrome and Firefox on Windows, Linux and Android often cannot. When a video fails to open, the page says it is probably this and suggests Safari, or setting Camera > Formats to Most Compatible.
- No sound. GIFs have no audio track.
- Not for clips longer than a minute. Frames are read by seeking the video one frame at a time, which is exact but takes a moment per frame on a phone (a 60 s clip at 10 fps is 600 seeks).
How big will the GIF be?
| Clip | Frames | Typical size |
|---|---|---|
| 3 s, 320 px, 10 fps | 30 | 0.3 to 1 MB |
| 5 s, 480 px, 10 fps | 50 | 1.5 to 4 MB |
| 5 s, 640 px, 20 fps | 100 | 5 to 12 MB |
| 15 s, 640 px, 15 fps | 225 | 12 to 30 MB |
Size grows with width × height × frames, and with how busy each frame is. Speed changes the frame count too: at 2× the GIF covers the same seconds of video in half as many frames. Many chat apps cap uploads at 8 to 25 MB, and a GIF over about 10 MB loads slowly on a web page.
Questions
How do I turn a video into a GIF on my phone?
Open this page, tap Choose a video or pictures and pick the clip from your camera roll. Drag the two trim handles (or type exact seconds) around the moment you want, keep 480 px and 10 fps for a GIF that sends easily, and tap Make GIF. On an iPhone, clips recorded in the default High Efficiency (HEVC) format open in Safari; Chrome and Firefox on Windows or Android usually cannot play them, and the page tells you so.
How do I make a high quality GIF from a video?
Choose Original or 640 px and 15 to 24 fps, and keep the clip short: 3 seconds at 640 × 360 and 20 fps is 60 full frames, roughly 3 to 8 MB. Every frame gets its own 256-colour palette, which is the most a GIF allows, so smooth gradients still band at any setting; footage with flat colours and sharp edges (screen recordings, cartoons) looks best. The frame rate stops at 30 fps because GIF delays are counted in whole hundredths of a second and browsers slow any frame shorter than 2 hundredths down to a tenth, so very high rates backfire; at 30 fps the delays alternate 3, 3 and 4 hundredths to keep the clip on time.
How do I make a GIF from pictures?
Pick 2 to 100 pictures at once. Each becomes one frame; drag rows to change the order (or use ↑ and ↓) and give each picture its own delay, for example 200, 300 and 500 ms. GIF delays are whole hundredths of a second, so 205 ms is stored as 210. Pictures of another shape are fitted inside the first picture's frame on a white background. Reverse, boomerang, speed and crop work for pictures too.
Is it free, and without a watermark?
Yes. There is no watermark, no sign-up and no fee, and the length limit (15 seconds, or 60 when you raise it) is there because GIFs grow fast, not to sell an upgrade. The video is decoded and encoded by your own browser, so it is never uploaded; the page sends only an anonymous page-view count and two fixed event names (a file was opened, a GIF was made), never the file, its name or its size.