100% on-device · nothing uploaded
Video to GIF maker
Drop in a video, scrub to the moment you want, and turn it into an animated GIF. Everything runs in this tab on your own device, so the video never leaves it. A per-clip colour palette keeps the GIF crisp and as small as a GIF can be.
How to use it
- Choose a video — MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and more all work.
- Scrub the preview and set the start and end of the clip. Shorter clips make far smaller GIFs.
- Pick a frame rate (10–15 is smooth for most clips) and a width, then Make GIF — the first run loads the engine once, then the GIF downloads.
What is happening in the shot matters more than how large it is
GIF’s inefficiency usually gets blamed on the colour cap alone, but the structural limit costs more. A frame can leave unchanged regions transparent and skip storing them, yet the format has no motion compensation: it cannot record that a block moved eleven pixels left, only that pixels are now a different colour. A locked-off shot with one small moving subject compresses beautifully, while a pan or a handheld wobble repaints every pixel of every frame.
The same asymmetry decides whether to cut the frame rate or the width. On moving footage, where skipping unchanged regions gains nothing, halving the frame rate halves the number of full images stored and is the biggest lever available. On a static shot the opposite holds: near-identical frames already cost almost nothing, so trimming a second off the clip does far more.
Palette and dithering are the only real quality dials
A GIF frame can reference at most 256 colours, and video arrives with millions, so something must map one onto the other. Building that palette from the actual clip rather than a fixed generic set is what stops a sunset collapsing into four stripes: the scene’s dominant colours claim the slots, so a shot that is mostly skin and sky spends its entries there rather than on greens it never uses.
Dithering covers what the palette cannot reach by scattering pixels of two available colours so the eye blends them into a third. It hides banding convincingly and it costs file size, because scattered pixels are noise and GIF’s compression rewards long runs of identical ones. Flat graphics and screen recordings look better without it; gradients and filmed footage need it. Transparency is the other hard edge: a pixel is either fully opaque or fully clear, so soft shadows gain a jagged fringe.
Questions
Is my video uploaded to make the GIF?
No. The engine loads into your browser and does the work on your device, so the video never leaves this tab. Most free "video to GIF" sites upload your file to a server — which matters if the clip is personal.
Why is my GIF so much bigger than the video?
A GIF stores every frame as a whole picture and is capped at 256 colours, so it is a much less efficient format than an MP4 — a few seconds of GIF can outweigh a minute of video. Keeping the clip short and the width modest is the biggest lever on the file size.
What frame rate and size should I pick?
12–15 fps looks smooth for most clips while keeping the file reasonable; drop to 8–10 fps for a smaller file. For width, 320–480 px suits sharing in chat or on a page; go larger only if you need it, since size grows with the pixel count.
How long a clip can I turn into a GIF?
Up to a few hundred frames — roughly 30–60 seconds at a low frame rate. Longer than that and the tool will ask you to shorten the clip or lower the frame rate, because a huge GIF would exhaust the browser's memory.
Does it keep the sound?
No — the GIF format has no audio track, so a GIF is always silent. If you need the sound, keep the original video or extract the audio separately.
Updated 2026-07-20. Runs fully in your browser — nothing is uploaded.