Video to GIF
Turn a few seconds of video into an animated GIF.
Everything runs inside your browser. Your files never leave your device.
Drop your file here
.mp4, .m4v, .mov, .qt, .webm, .mkv, .ts, .mts, .m2ts · they stay on this device
Ask about Video to GIF
Questions about what this tool does, which option to pick, or what it can and cannot handle.
This is the one part of the site that uses a server. The question you type here is sent to an AI provider to be answered — your files and whatever you put in the tool above are not, and the assistant cannot see them. Answers are generated and can be wrong; the tool itself is not guessing.
About the Video to GIF
A GIF is a strange format to be using in 2026 and it is not going away, because it is the only moving image that plays absolutely everywhere: in a chat window, in an email, in a document, in a bug report, on a page that blocks video. That reach is the entire argument for it, and it comes at a considerable price.
The price is that GIF has no compression between frames. Modern video stores one full picture and then, for the following frames, only a description of what changed — which is why a minute of video can be smaller than a single high-resolution photograph. A GIF stores every frame whole, in a palette of at most 256 colours, and nothing about that changed since the format was designed in 1987. Ten seconds at full width is not a large GIF, it is an enormous one, measured in tens of megabytes, and it will be refused by the very chat window you made it for.
So the three controls here are all size controls, and the defaults are already conservative. Width at 480 pixels is generous for something that will be viewed inline. Twelve frames a second reads as movement without storing twice the frames that fifteen would. Keeping the clip under about five seconds is the single most effective thing you can do.
One technical decision worth mentioning: each frame gets its own palette of 256 colours rather than sharing one across the whole animation. On a scene that changes — someone walking past a window, a screen recording that scrolls — that tracks the colours far better and avoids the muddy banding a single shared palette produces. It costs a little size and is nearly always the right trade.
There is no sound. GIF has never had any.
How to use it
- 1Add the video and set the start and end times for the section you want.
- 2Keep it short. Three to five seconds is where GIFs stay usable.
- 3Set the width and frame rate — lower on both if the file comes out too big.
- 4Build the GIF, check the size reported underneath, and download.
Questions
- Why is my GIF so large?
- Because every frame is stored whole. Cut the length, then the width, then the frame rate — in that order, since length is the biggest multiplier.
- Why do the colours look wrong?
- GIF allows 256 colours per frame. Gradients, skin tones and video noise all suffer, and no encoder avoids that limit.
- Can I have sound in it?
- No. The format has no provision for audio at all. If you need sound, a short MP4 is what you actually want.
- What length is sensible?
- Under five seconds for anything you are going to send to somebody. Ten is possible at a small width and a low frame rate.