Video to GIF Converter

Add a video to the box above, play it, and choose the part you want: type the start and end in seconds, or pause the player and press Use current time. Set the frames per second and the width, add a caption if you like, and press Convert to GIF. A moment later the finished animation plays on the page with its size, frame count and length, ready to download.

Everything happens in your browser with our own GIF encoder, so your video is not uploaded anywhere. MP4, WebM and MOV files work as long as your browser can play them, up to 1 GB. One GIF can be up to 60 seconds long and up to 600 frames. Keep in mind from the start that a GIF has no sound: the picture moves, the audio is left behind.

GIF is an old picture format that can hold several frames and play them one after another. That is why it became the format for short moving pictures on the web: almost every browser, chat app, forum and email program shows a GIF without a video player, and it starts playing on its own, silently, and loops.

Turning a clip into a GIF makes sense when you want that behaviour: a reaction in a chat, a short how-to in a help article, a product in motion on a page that does not accept video, or a moment from a game you want to share. For anything long, anything that needs sound, or anything where the full colour matters, keep the video itself.

This is a video to GIF maker that works entirely in your browser. You do not install anything and you do not wait for an upload: the video is opened by the same player your browser uses for any video on the web, and the frames are read straight from it. That also means a large file is ready to use the moment you add it.

The tool covers the usual jobs in one place: choosing the part, the smoothness, the width and the shape, adding a caption, changing the speed, playing the clip backwards or as a boomerang, and keeping the result under a size limit. The settings you choose are remembered on your device for the next time, except the caption text.

You may have tried a video to GIF converter free of charge and found a watermark on the result, a daily limit or a sign-up page in the way. This one has none of those. The GIF is made by your own browser, so it costs us nothing extra to make it, and there is nothing to charge for.

There is also no limit on how many GIFs you make. Make one, press Another part, choose a different moment of the same video and make the next one, without adding the file again.

Using video to GIF online usually means sending your file to someone else's server and waiting. Here the page is online, but the work is not: once the page has loaded, the frames are read and encoded on your device. You can even switch off the internet connection after loading and the tool keeps working.

It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android phones and iPhones in any current browser. On a computer it is faster and handles longer, wider clips; on a phone it is handy for a short clip straight from the camera roll. If a phone becomes slow, choose a shorter part, fewer frames per second or a smaller width.

Most clips people want to turn into a GIF are MP4 files from a phone, a screen recorder or a download. MP4 to GIF starts with choosing the part: GIFs work well when they are short, and the file size grows with every second. Three to six seconds is the classic length for a reaction or a loop; ten to fifteen seconds suits a short how-to.

Type the start and end in seconds, or play the video, pause at the moment the GIF should begin and press Use current time next to Start, then do the same for End. The line under the times shows the length and how many frames that makes. If you move the start past the end, the end moves along, so the part never becomes empty.

The tool allows up to 60 seconds and up to 600 frames per GIF. At 12 frames per second, 60 seconds would be 720 frames, so for long parts the number of frames is capped at 600 and spread evenly over the part. In practice, anything longer than about 15 seconds makes a very large GIF, and a video is the better format for it.

Frames per second decide how smooth the motion looks. A video usually has 24, 30 or 60 frames per second; a GIF rarely needs that many. The tool offers 5, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 25 frames per second. 10 to 15 gives the familiar GIF look, 20 or 25 looks close to the video, and 5 gives a choppy, flip-book feel that is fine for slow scenes and screen recordings.

Every extra frame is a whole extra picture in the file, so the size grows almost in step with the frame rate. Going from 12 to 24 frames per second roughly doubles the file while the motion looks only a little smoother. If the GIF is too big, lowering the frame rate is one of the gentlest ways to shrink it.

Width sets how wide the GIF is in pixels; the height follows from the shape. Original keeps the width of the video up to 1280 pixels, and you can also pick 640, 480 (the default), 320, 240 or a custom width from 32 to 1280. The line under the setting shows the exact size the GIF will have.

Width matters more for the file size than any other setting, because the number of pixels grows with the square of the width. A GIF 640 pixels wide has about 1.8 times the pixels of one 480 wide, and four times the pixels of one 320 wide. Halving the width roughly quarters the file. For chats 480 is plenty, for small previews 320 or 240.

Crop changes the shape: Original shape keeps the video as it is, Square cuts a 1:1 frame from the middle, 16:9 makes a wide frame and 9:16 a tall one. The crop is always taken from the centre of the picture. Square suits profile pictures and grids, 9:16 suits stories and tall phone screens, and cropping away empty edges also makes the file smaller.

The tool does not decode video itself; it uses the player that is built into your browser. That keeps it fast and private, and it means the question is simply whether your browser can play the file. If the video plays in the box, it can be turned into a GIF.

MP4 with H.264 video plays in every current browser and is the safest choice. WebM with VP8, VP9 or AV1 plays in Chrome, Edge and Firefox and in recent Safari versions. MOV files from phones and cameras usually work when the video inside is H.264. HEVC (H.265), used by newer iPhones and some Android phones and cameras, plays in Safari but often not in Chrome or Firefox on Windows.

Old formats such as AVI, WMV or FLV rarely play in a browser at all. If a file is refused, open it in a desktop video player or editor and export it as MP4 with H.264; that also helps with damaged files, because the export rewrites them cleanly. The tool accepts files up to 1 GB, but only the part you choose is read, so even a long recording turns into a GIF quickly.

For MP4 to GIF high quality results, start from a good source and keep the GIF small in the right way. Use the original file rather than a copy that has been sent through a chat app, because those copies are already compressed and every blocky edge ends up in the GIF.

Then choose the settings that matter for looks: 256 colours, dithering on, 15 to 20 frames per second for fast motion, and a width that matches where the GIF will be shown, not more. Cut the part as short as possible instead of lowering the quality to fit a size limit: two seconds at good settings look far better than eight seconds squeezed down.

Steady shots also help. A clip where only the subject moves keeps the colours calm from frame to frame, while a shaky, handheld clip changes every pixel in every frame and looks noisier as a GIF.

People often search for video to GIF high quality and expect the GIF to look exactly like the video. It is fair to be honest about this: it cannot. Every GIF frame can hold at most 256 colours, while a video frame holds millions. Smooth gradients such as skies, skin and shadows show slight bands or a fine dot pattern from dithering.

GIF is also far less efficient. A video stores mostly the changes between frames with clever compression; a GIF stores whole pictures with simple, lossless packing. That is why a GIF is often ten or more times larger than the MP4 it came from, even at a smaller width and lower frame rate.

Within those limits the tool gives you what a GIF can do: 256 colours with a shared palette for steady colours, dithering to hide banding, and up to 1280 pixels of width for clips that need it.

Turning video to GIF without losing quality is, strictly speaking, impossible, and any tool that promises it is not telling the whole story. Going from millions of colours to 256 always loses some colour detail, and almost every video has more frames per second than a GIF should carry.

What you can do is lose as little as possible where people will notice. Keep 256 colours and dithering on, keep the original width if the clip is short, use 20 or 25 frames per second, and do not set a file size limit, because the limit works by lowering colours and width. The result will be large, but it will be as close to the video as a GIF gets.

If keeping every detail truly matters, share the video file instead, or make the GIF only for the places that require one and link to the full video for everyone else.

Making video to GIF with text takes one field: type your caption in the Caption box and it is drawn onto every frame. It uses a bold, meme-style font with a black outline, so it stays readable on light and dark scenes alike. Choose Top or Bottom, pick any colour (white is the default), and set the size with the slider.

The caption is part of the pictures, not a separate layer, so it shows everywhere the GIF goes and cannot be switched off by the viewer. Long text is squeezed to fit the width, so keep captions short: a few words read well at chat size, a full sentence becomes small. For two lines of text, make two GIFs or keep only the punchline.

Bright yellow or white with the black outline is the classic reaction style. If the caption should only appear for part of the clip, make two GIFs, or trim the part so the text fits the whole moment.

A common reason to make a GIF is to post it in a chat. For video to GIF for Discord, the key number is the upload size. Discord's free upload limit (10 MB at the time of writing) applies to GIFs like any other file, and larger GIFs may be refused. Paid plans and some servers allow more, and limits change, so check the current number in the app if you are unsure.

The tool has a 10 MB choice under File size limit for exactly this. With it set, the tool makes the GIF, checks the size, and if it is too big tries again with fewer colours and then a smaller width, up to ten tries, until it fits. If it still does not fit, you get the smallest version and a note, and a shorter part or fewer frames per second will get you there.

For chat, 480 pixels wide and 10 to 15 frames per second are sensible starting points; a 5 to 8 second clip at those settings usually fits under 10 MB. A GIF for an emoji or a profile picture needs to be far smaller and square, so use Square crop, 128 to 240 pixels and a custom limit in KB.

Doing video to GIF iPhone conversions does not need an app. Open this page in Safari, tap the box and choose Photo Library to pick a clip from your Photos, or Choose File to pick one from Files. The video opens in the player on the page, and you can scrub through it, pause and tap Use current time to set the start and end.

After pressing Convert to GIF and waiting for the preview, tap Download GIF. Safari saves the file to the Downloads folder in the Files app. From there you can share it to a chat directly, or open it and use Save Image to put it into Photos. Photos shows a GIF as a still picture in the grid but plays it when you open it.

One snag: newer iPhones record in HEVC (H.265) by default. Safari on iPhone and Mac plays those videos, but Chrome on Windows often cannot, so the same MOV file may work on the phone and fail on a Windows computer. Use Safari, or set Camera, Formats to Most Compatible on the iPhone for future recordings, which records H.264 that every browser plays.

On Android, open this page in Chrome or any other current browser, tap the box and pick the clip from your gallery or files. Most phone videos are MP4 with H.264 and play right away. Some newer phones record HEVC to save space; if a clip does not play, switch the camera to the more compatible format in its settings, or try another browser.

Phones have less memory than computers, so a long, wide part can make the page slow. For a phone, 320 or 480 pixels and a part of a few seconds are comfortable. The finished GIF is saved to the Downloads folder, and from there you can share it to any app that takes pictures.

Screen recordings are one of the most useful things to turn into a GIF: a short click-through of a setting, a bug that needs showing, a new feature in a help article. They also behave very differently from camera footage, and a couple of settings make a big difference.

Turn dithering off under More options. Without dithering, the encoder stores only the parts of each frame that changed, and in a screen recording most of the screen stays the same from one frame to the next. That often makes the GIF many times smaller. Flat interface colours also fit comfortably in 128 or even 64 colours.

Keep the width large enough to read the text, often 640 or the original up to 1280, and lower the frame rate instead: 5 to 10 frames per second is plenty for a mouse moving between buttons. Trim pauses at the start and end so the GIF gets to the point.

Speed changes how fast the GIF plays compared with the video: 0.5× for slow motion, 1× normal, and 1.5×, 2× or 4× faster. Speeding up shortens playback without dropping frames, so a 10-second process at 2× plays in 5 seconds but keeps the same number of frames and file size. To make the file smaller as well, combine a faster speed with fewer frames per second.

Direction offers Forward, Reverse and Boomerang. Reverse plays the part backwards, which is fun for pours, jumps and anything that falls. Boomerang plays forward and then back, so the motion returns smoothly to the start instead of jumping; it nearly doubles the frames and the file size.

Loop is Forever by default, which is what most people expect. Play once stops on the last frame, handy for a how-to that ends on the result. A boomerang always loops, because a back-and-forth that stops halfway would look broken.

A GIF that loops without a visible jump feels far more polished than one that snaps back to the start. The trick is to choose a part where the last frame looks almost like the first: a wave that rolls in and out, a ball that bounces back to the same height, a person who returns to the same pose, a fan or wheel that turns a full circle.

Play the video slowly around the moment you want, pause where the motion matches, and use Use current time to set the start and the end exactly there. Small adjustments of a tenth of a second at the end often remove the jump completely. The preview plays the loop as it will appear, so you can see right away whether it is smooth.

When no clean loop exists, Boomerang is the easy fix: the clip plays forward and then backward, so it always ends where it began. It suits pours, jumps, swings and head turns. For a calm background loop, such as rain on a window or leaves in the wind, a short part with a low frame rate and no caption often loops without anyone noticing the seam.

A GIF frame can hold at most 256 colours. The tool builds one palette shared by all frames, which keeps colours steady and avoids flicker, and maps every pixel to it. Under More options you can choose 256, 128, 64 or 32 colours. Fewer colours make a smaller file, at the cost of more visible banding in gradients.

Dithering mixes pixels of neighbouring colours in a fine pattern that the eye blends together, so skies and skin look smoother. It is on by default for camera footage. The pattern is noise that GIF compression handles poorly, and it changes in every frame, so a dithered GIF is noticeably larger. For screen recordings, cartoons and flat graphics, turning it off usually looks just as good and is much smaller.

GIFs have no sound. The GIF format has no place to store audio at all, so video to GIF with sound is impossible, whichever tool you use. The tool reminds you of this next to the button, and the video player on the page is muted for the same reason.

If the sound matters, keep the MP4. Most chat apps, social networks and websites play short MP4 clips almost like GIFs, often looping and starting on their own, and with sound when the viewer taps. A GIF is the right choice only when the silent, looping picture is the point.

Many places limit the size of a file, so the tool has a File size limit setting: No limit, 10 MB, 5 MB, 1 MB or Custom with any number of kilobytes. With a limit set, the tool makes the GIF, checks its size and, if it is too big, tries again: first with fewer colours (128, then 64), then with a smaller width, up to ten tries in total.

If the limit still cannot be reached, the tool tells you so and gives you the smallest version it made. It never quietly hands you a file that breaks your limit. The fastest fixes are a shorter part and fewer frames per second, because they remove whole frames rather than lowering the look of every frame.

The part is short and starts on the action.

Frames per second suit the motion: low for screens, higher for fast action.

Width no larger than the GIF will be shown at; crop set if you need a square or tall frame.

Caption short and readable, in the right place.

Speed, direction and loop chosen under More options.

File size limit set if the place you share to has one.

Preview watched once before downloading.

Your video is not uploaded. The page loads the tool once, and from then on your browser plays the video, reads the frames, draws the caption and encodes the GIF on your device. Nothing is sent to our server or anyone else's, and nothing is stored after you close the page.

That matters for family clips, recordings of your work screen and anything you have not published yet. It also means a 1 GB file is ready to use instantly, without waiting for an upload.

When you press Convert to GIF, the tool spreads the frames evenly over the part you chose, according to the frames per second. For each frame it moves the video to that moment, draws the picture onto a canvas at the width and crop you chose, and adds the caption with its outline if there is one.

Our GIF encoder then builds one palette for all frames, maps every pixel to it with or without dithering, and packs the frames with LZW compression. Without dithering it stores only the changed parts of each frame. With Reverse or Boomerang the frame order changes; with a size limit the encoder repeats the job with fewer colours and smaller widths until the file fits.

Cut the part tightly. A GIF that starts on the action and ends right after it feels sharper, and every second you trim saves file size.

Choose clips with a steady camera. Only the subject should move; shaking changes every pixel and makes the GIF larger and noisier.

Pick a moment that loops well, where the last frame is close to the first. If none exists, Boomerang hides the jump.

Choose the width the GIF will be shown at, not larger. A bigger GIF does not look sharper when it is scaled down, it only loads more slowly.

Keep captions to a few words and use the outline colour contrast: white or yellow text on most footage.

Before you post, open the downloaded file in a browser tab to see it as others will.

Share the GIF straight from your downloads folder. If it turns out a little too large for a site, Compress GIF reduces it without making it again. To use one frame as a still picture, GIF to JPG and GIF to PNG save the first frame, and GIF to WebP turns the animation into a smaller animated WebP for websites.

To make an animation from photos instead of a video, JPG to GIF puts pictures together with your own timing. Resize Image, Crop Image and Merge Images help prepare stills, and everything else is listed under Image Tools.