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Video to GIF

Turn a clip into a looping animated GIF with a tuned colour palette.

Turn a clip into a looping GIF with a palette built from the footage. Set the size, frame rate and colours to hit a limit. Free, no watermark, no upload.

What Video to GIF is for

For a short loop that has to play where video does not: an email, a bug report, a chat client, a README. The palette is built from the clip itself rather than a fixed set, which is the difference between a clean GIF and a muddy one.

The settings that decide the size

Width matters most: 480 pixels is a good default for chat and documentation; 320 for anything small. Then frame rate: 10 to 15 frames a second looks smooth for most clips and is half the size of 30. Then colours: 128 or 64 cuts the size further with little visible change on simple footage.

Keep it short

A GIF stores every frame as a separate image. Three to six seconds is the sweet spot; beyond ten, a GIF is usually several megabytes. Trim the clip here before converting.

When to use MP4 instead

Slack, Discord, X and most websites play short muted MP4s inline, looping, at a tenth of the size of a GIF. Use a GIF when the destination does not play video: email, some documentation tools and older chat clients.

How to use it

  1. Add your files. Drop them on the page or choose them. They stay on your device.
  2. Set the output format and quality. The defaults suit most files.
  3. Press convert and save the results, individually or as one ZIP.

Questions

Why is my GIF bigger than the video?

Because GIF is a thirty-year-old format with no motion compression: it stores frames rather than the differences between them. A ten-second GIF is routinely larger than the MP4 it came from, and looks worse.

How do I make the GIF smaller?

Halve the width, which cuts the size by roughly three quarters. Then lower the frame rate. Trimming the length helps least of the three.

Why does my GIF look grainy?

GIF holds 256 colours. A clip with gradients, skies or skin tones has to be approximated with dithering, which is the speckling you can see. Flat graphics come through cleanly.

Does the GIF keep the sound?

No. GIF has no audio track at all, which is part of why it is small enough to be worth using.