Why is my GIF so big?

A GIF has no real video compression: every frame is its own 256-colour picture. Size grows with length, picture size and frame rate, roughly in proportion to each. Six seconds of handheld phone video at 480 px and 15 fps comes out around 7 MB; a screen recording or a shot on a tripod is far smaller, because the tool skips pixels that did not change since the last frame. Thirty seconds at 640 px and 20 fps can pass 50 MB. Shorten the range first, then drop to 320 px or 10 fps.

Is my video uploaded?

No. The frames are decoded in your browser with WebCodecs and the GIF is written in the page itself. There is no server, no queue, no account and no watermark.

Can I convert an iPhone MOV to GIF?

Yes. MOV, MP4, M4V, WebM and MKV all work, as long as your browser can decode the video inside. iPhone HEVC decodes in Safari and in Chrome or Edge on most Macs and Windows PCs. Portrait videos stay portrait.

What size and frame rate should I pick?

480 px on the longest side at 15 fps is the default for Slack, Discord and Reddit, and it is the same for portrait and landscape clips. Use 320 px for email and chat apps with tight limits, and 20 fps only for fast motion like sports or gameplay. GIFs are capped at 30 seconds here because anything longer is better sent as an MP4.

Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Firefox and Safari 16.4 or newer on a desktop, and Chrome on Android. The tool needs WebCodecs to decode the video; if your browser lacks it, the page says so instead of failing.

Free Tool

Video to GIF

Turn any part of a video into a looping GIF in your browser. MP4, MOV and WebM. No upload, no watermark, no sign-up.

MP4, MOV, WebMPick start and endNo uploadNo watermark

Drop a video to turn into a GIF

MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV up to 500 MB. It never leaves your device.

Why a GIF should stay short

GIF is a 1987 image format that happens to support animation. It has no motion compression at all: a video stores most frames as small differences from the last one, while a GIF stores each frame as a complete picture in at most 256 colours. That is why a ten second phone clip of a few megabytes can turn into a GIF several times its size.

This tool does two things to keep the file down. Each frame gets its own palette built from its own colours, so a sunset and a night scene both look right without dithering noise that bloats the file. And any pixel that has barely changed since the previous frame is left transparent instead of being drawn again, so a talking head on a still background costs a fraction of a full frame. The rest is up to the three numbers you pick: length, size and frame rate.

Everything runs on your machine. The browser decodes the frames with WebCodecs and writes the GIF in the page, so the video never crosses the network and there is no watermark to remove.

Frequently asked questions

File size, frame rate and formats

Drop the video, drag the start and end handles around the moment you want, pick a size and frame rate, and press Make GIF. The GIF loops forever and is ready to download, preview included, in a few seconds for a short clip.