🌀 Video to GIF

Step-by-step

1. Pick a video MP4, WebM, and MOV all work. The video is never uploaded — reading, frame extraction, and encoding all happen in your browser.
2. Set the start point and length The preview jumps to that frame so you can see where the clip begins. Two to four seconds is the practical range — GIF has no compression between frames, so every frame is a full image and the file grows in proportion to duration.
3. Choose fps and width These are the main dials for file size. 10 fps at 480px is a good starting point. If the result is too heavy, reduce the width first (it has the largest effect), then the frame rate.
4. Press start Frames are extracted in sequence, a shared 256-colour palette is computed, and the GIF is encoded. Progress appears in the status line — with many frames this takes a moment, which is normal.
5. Download You get a GIF ready to drop into a chat, a social post, or an article. If it is too large, go back and reduce the width rather than trying to compress a finished GIF — it is far more effective.

When you would use this

Two hard limits of GIF

Understanding why GIFs are large and often ugly is what lets you set the options sensibly.

256 colours, maximum. That is a 1987 design decision: each frame can use at most 256 distinct colours. Real video may contain hundreds of thousands, and compressing that down makes continuous areas — skies, skin, shadows — step into visible bands.

No compression between frames. Modern video codecs store only what changed since the previous frame, so a static background costs almost nothing. GIF has no such mechanism: every frame is a complete image. That is why a 5-second video clip of 500KB can become an 8MB GIF.

Getting it small and still watchable

The three dials differ enormously in effect. Adjust in this order:

1. Width — by far the biggest lever. Halving the width leaves a quarter of the pixels. Going 480 → 320 often cuts more than half the file.
2. Duration — a linear effect. Half the time, half the file. Most GIFs only need the 2–3 seconds where something actually happens.
3. Frame rate — also linear, but drop it too far and you get a slideshow. 10 fps is the usual floor; 8 fps is visibly choppy.

What material suits GIF

Works well: screen recordings, UI demonstrations, illustration and animation, anything with flat blocks of colour. Such material has few colours to begin with, so 256 is ample and compression works well.

Works badly: live-action footage, landscapes, close-ups of people, anything with heavy gradients or noise. These hit both problems at once — visible banding and a huge file.

If your material is in the second group and the destination supports video, seriously consider just using MP4. GIF's value is compatibility, not quality.

Frequently asked questions

What you might need next

Image work rarely ends in one step. These pair up with Video to GIF most often:

• 🎬 Video Frame Grab — Grab any frame as a cover image
• 📐 Resize Image — By width, percentage, or exact size
• 🎯 Compress to Size — Say 2MB and it lands under 2MB

Want to share the result? Upload turns images, photos, or videos into a short link with optional password, expiry, and view limits. Or head back to all 12 tools.