Video to GIF

Drop the video above, drag the trim handles to the section you want, and press Make GIF. The result appears on the page, actually looping, so you can see exactly what you are getting before downloading it. There is no sign-up, no watermark and no file size limit — the conversion runs on your own machine.

No limit on the source file, because it is never uploaded — a 2 GB video is fine, since only the frames you select are ever decoded. The practical limit is on the output: GIFs get unusable quickly, so encoding is capped at 600 frames. At 12.5 fps that is about 48 seconds, and honestly anything past ten seconds is usually a mistake.

Because GIF is a genuinely bad format for video. It stores 256 colours per frame and uses LZW compression from 1987, which modern video codecs beat by an order of magnitude — a clip that is 400 KB as an MP4 is routinely 8 MB as a GIF. Three things fix it, in order of effect: trim harder, since size is proportional to length; reduce the width, since bytes scale with area rather than with width; and lower the frame rate, since halving it halves the file.

Often not. If whatever you are posting to accepts a video file, use one — it will be smaller, sharper and smoother. What GIF still has is that it plays inline, silently and automatically, in places that will not embed a video: email, documentation, changelogs, issue trackers and some chat clients. That is a real need and it is why this tool exists, but it is worth checking first whether you actually need the format.

It hides the banding a 256-colour palette causes. When smooth gradients — skies, shadows, soft backgrounds — are reduced to a few colours, they break into visible bands. Floyd–Steinberg dithering spreads each pixel's rounding error into its neighbours, trading those bands for a fine stipple that the eye accepts far more readily. It is not free: that stipple is high-frequency noise, which is exactly what LZW compresses worst, and on a gradient-heavy clip it can nearly triple the file. Worth it on photographic content, and worth turning off for flat graphics and screen recordings, which have no gradients to band in the first place.

Start at 128 and go down until you can see it. Video is surprisingly forgiving — 64 colours is often indistinguishable at normal viewing size and meaningfully smaller. Flat content like a screen recording or a cartoon can drop very low, sometimes to 32, because it genuinely contains few colours. Photographic content with gradients needs more, or needs dithering.

By default each frame gets its own palette chosen from its own colours, which is the best fit per frame but lets colours shift slightly from frame to frame — visible as a shimmer on flat backgrounds. The shared option computes one palette from frames sampled across the clip and uses it throughout, which stops the shimmer and makes the file smaller, since the colour table is stored once rather than in every frame. It is worse when the clip changes scene, because a single palette then has to cover both.

GIF stores the delay between frames in hundredths of a second, so only rates that divide evenly into 100 are exact — 50, 25, 20, 12.5 and 10 fps. Ask for 30 and each frame gets rounded to 3 hundredths, giving about 33 fps. Worse, a delay of 0 or 1 hundredth is treated as 10 by most renderers for historical reasons, which is why 60 fps GIFs often play slower than 30 fps ones. The tool shows the rate you will actually get whenever it differs from the one you asked for.

Yes, both. Reverse simply plays the selected frames backwards. Boomerang plays forward and then back, which removes the visible jump at the end of a loop — useful when the start and end of your clip do not match. Boomerang doubles the frame count, and therefore roughly doubles the file, so trim accordingly. The turnaround frames are not repeated, which would otherwise read as a stutter at each end.

No. Nothing is added to the output, there is no branding, no sign-up and no limit on how many you make. The GIF you download is exactly the frames from your video.

No. The file is read locally, decoded by your browser, and the frames are drawn to a canvas and encoded on your machine. Nothing is transmitted and nothing is stored. This matters more than usual for video, which is often personal, and it also means there is no upload wait — the tool starts working immediately even on a large file.

No, and no GIF ever can. The format has no audio track at all — it is a still image format with an animation extension. If sound matters, you need a video file rather than a GIF.

Whatever your browser can play, which in practice means MP4 with H.264, WebM, and most MOV files. Support for HEVC and AV1 depends on the machine rather than the browser. If a file will not load, converting it to MP4 first will fix it.

Yes, and screen recordings are the ideal case. They are mostly static, so LZW compression works well and files stay small, and they have flat colours with no gradients — so you can drop the palette low and turn dithering off, both of which shrink the result further. A ten-second UI demo can come out under a megabyte.