Skip to content

GIF Maker

Turn a video into an animated GIF, with control over frame rate and width.

GIF Maker

Create GIFs from your videos instantly.

What GIF Maker does

GIFs remain the easiest way to embed a short loop where a video player is unavailable or unwelcome: an issue tracker, a README, a chat message.

Conversion uses a two-pass palette process, generating an optimised colour palette for the clip and then applying it, which gives noticeably better results than a naive conversion.

  • Frame rate from 1 to 30 frames per second
  • Output width from 100 to 800 pixels
  • Two-pass palette generation for better colour

How to use GIF Maker

  1. 1

    Add your video

    Trim it first if it is long; GIFs grow very quickly with duration.

  2. 2

    Set the frame rate

    Ten to fifteen frames per second is usually smooth enough. Every extra frame adds directly to the file size.

  3. 3

    Set the width

    Height is scaled proportionally. Smaller is dramatically smaller as a file.

  4. 4

    Create and download

    Check the file size before embedding it anywhere.

Limits and known behaviour

  • GIF supports only 256 colours per frame, so gradients and video footage show visible banding. This is a limitation of the format, not of the conversion.
  • GIFs are large. A few seconds of video can easily exceed several megabytes — far larger than the equivalent video file.
  • There is no audio in a GIF.
  • The whole video is converted; there is no start or end point here, so trim the clip first.
  • Loop count and dithering cannot be configured.
  • The first operation downloads roughly 30 MB of engine.

Privacy and data handling

Runs in your browser after a one-time download

  • Your media file is not uploaded. It is processed in this page.
  • To do that, the FFmpeg engine — roughly 30 MB of WebAssembly — is downloaded from the public unpkg CDN when you start your first operation. That request reveals your IP address to the CDN and tells it which files you fetched. It does not carry your media.
  • After the engine loads, all processing happens on your own processor.
  • Nothing is retained after the tab is closed.

Site-wide data handling, including analytics and advertising, is described in the privacy policy.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my GIF so large?

GIF compresses far less efficiently than modern video codecs and stores every frame. Reduce the width, reduce the frame rate, and keep the clip short — those three, in that order, have the biggest effect.

Why do the colours look banded?

GIF is limited to 256 colours per frame. The palette pass makes the best of it, but photographic content and gradients will still band.

Can I make a GIF from part of a video?

Trim the clip with the video trimmer first, then convert the trimmed file.