Video to GIF — turn a clip into a looping GIF in your browser

How to use the video to GIF converter

1. Drop a video onto the box or click to choose one. A timeline appears.
2. Drag the handles, or type Start and End in seconds, to choose the moment you want. The default is the first 5 seconds.
3. Set the Frame rate (5 to 25 fps), the Width in pixels (32 to 1,920; height follows the video’s shape) and the number of Colours.
4. Choose a Palette: One for the clip or Per frame.
5. Press Make GIF and download it. The result shows the GIF size, number of frames and dimensions.

What it does and when to use it

GIFs play automatically and loop silently almost everywhere: in chat apps, emails, README files, documentation and old forums that do not accept video. That makes them handy for short reactions, product demos, UI bug reports and step-by-step how-tos. This tool takes a short section of any video you have and turns it into one.

Keep GIFs short. A few seconds is usually enough, and every extra second adds frames. Where a platform accepts video, a short MP4 is far smaller for the same quality; the GIF to video converter goes the other way if you need it. To shorten or tidy the source first, use the video trimmer, and to save single still images instead of an animation, the video frames extractor does that.

How it works

1. The tool works out the timestamps: one frame every 1 ÷ fps seconds across your range.
2. Mediabunny (about 0.7 MB, loaded the first time) seeks through the video in a Web Worker and WebCodecs decodes each frame, which is scaled to your width on an OffscreenCanvas.
3. The gifenc library (about 9 KB) reduces the colours to your palette size, either once for the whole clip or separately for each frame, and writes the GIF.
4. GIF stores frame delays in hundredths of a second, so the tool mixes delays to keep the total length right. At 12 fps it alternates 80 ms and 90 ms frames, so a 4-second clip still lasts exactly 4,000 ms.
5. The GIF is set to loop forever.

Examples

These frame counts and delays come from the tool’s own timing functions.

A reaction GIF. Start 3, End 7, 12 fps, 480 px wide: 48 frames, looping, with delays of 80 and 90 ms adding up to 4 seconds.

A small UI demo. Start 0, End 3, 10 fps, 320 px wide, 64 colours: 30 frames of 100 ms each. Flat interface colours survive a small palette well, so the file stays light.

Limits and tips

• No sound. GIF has no audio track.
• Width and frame rate matter most for file size; shorten the clip after that.
• Memory. All frames are held in memory while the GIF is built, so a long, wide, high-fps GIF can exhaust a phone’s browser tab.
• WebCodecs is required to decode the video. Use a current desktop Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, or Chrome on Android.