Video to GIF

GIFs are still the format that works everywhere a video doesn't autoplay: GitHub READMEs, Jira and Trello comments, Slack threads, email newsletters, forum posts and documentation pages. A three-second loop explains a UI bug or a product feature faster than a paragraph.

This tool turns a section of a video into an animated GIF in your browser. Play the clip, mark a start and end, choose width, frame rate and colour count, and it builds the GIF frame by frame with a proper palette for each frame. You get a preview before you download.

The video is never uploaded. That makes it suitable for screen recordings of internal tools, unreleased products or anything else you would rather keep off third-party servers.

The honest trade-off with GIF is size. The format dates from 1987, stores at most 256 colours per frame and compresses poorly compared with modern video. The settings exist so you can find the balance between smoothness and a file small enough for the place you are posting it.

How It Works

1. Open a video — MP4, WebM, MOV and more, up to 500 MB. A player appears and the default range is set to the first five seconds.
2. Pick the clip and settings — set start/end from the player or type them, then choose width (320–800 px), frame rate (8–20 fps), colours (64–256) and whether it loops.
3. Encode — the tool seeks to each frame time, draws the frame on a canvas, builds an optimized colour palette with gifenc's quantizer and writes it into the GIF with LZW compression. A progress bar counts frames, and the finished GIF is previewed on the page.

Compatibility & Support

Supported Input → Output Formats

• Input: MP4, M4V, MOV, WebM, OGV, MKV, 3GP (must be playable in your browser)
• Output: animated GIF (GIF89a), looping or play-once, 320–800 px wide
• Frame rate: 8, 10, 12, 15 or 20 frames per second

Unsupported Formats

Your browser must be able to play the video. MP4 with H.264 and WebM with VP8/VP9 play in every current browser. MOV and MKV depend on the codec inside; HEVC (H.265) videos from recent iPhones play in Safari and in Edge/Chrome on Windows with hardware support, but not everywhere else.

Audio is dropped — GIF has no sound. Clips longer than 600 frames (for example 50 seconds at 12 fps) are refused because the result would be far too large to be useful; shorten the range or lower the frame rate.

File Size Limits

Video files up to 500 MB. The GIF itself is limited by frame count (600) and width (800 px). As a rule of thumb, a 5-second clip at 480 px and 12 fps produces a 1.5–4 MB GIF, depending on how much of the picture moves.

Who Should Use This Tool?

• Students: A computer-science student records a 4-second clip of their app working and turns it into a GIF for a GitHub project README.
• Freelancers & Designers: A UI designer exports a Figma prototype recording as a looping 480 px GIF to show an animation in a client's Trello card.
• Office Professionals: A support agent creates a GIF showing the exact clicks to reset a password and pastes it into a help-centre article.
• Developers: A developer attaches a 10 fps GIF of a rendering bug to a pull request so reviewers see the problem without downloading a video.

Why This Tool Beats the Alternatives

• Private: no uploading of screen recordings or personal videos.
• No watermark stamped in the corner of the GIF.
• Full control of frame rate, width and colours instead of a single preset.
• Works on any OS with a modern browser — no GIF software needed.
• Refuses settings that would create an unusable 100 MB GIF, rather than letting you wait for it.

Pro Tips

• For screen recordings, 8–10 fps looks smooth enough and keeps files small; for real-world motion use 12–15 fps.
• Crop out everything that doesn't move before recording — static areas still cost bytes in every frame.
• Where the platform supports it (Twitter/X, Discord, most CMSs), a short MP4 is 5–10× smaller than the same GIF.

Open a video above, mark the moment you want, and download it as a GIF.