Turn any clip into a GIF, without the upload
Pick where the GIF starts, how long it runs, and how big it should be — the frames are captured and encoded into an animated GIF right inside this browser tab. Short clips for READMEs, docs, Slack threads and emails, made in seconds.
- 100% local · nothing uploaded
- Trim start & length
- Size & frame rate control
- No sign-up, no watermark
GIF settings
Your GIF is ready
Encoded entirely in your browser. Open the Network panel in your browser's developer tools while using this tool — no file ever leaves your device.
Frames In, GIF Out
A GIF is nothing more than a stack of still images with a delay attached to each one. This tool builds that stack from your video — and every step happens on your machine.
Trim the moment
Set the start point and length. Five to ten seconds is the GIF sweet spot — long enough to show the action, short enough to stay a sane file size.
Capture frames locally
The clip plays silently in a hidden canvas while the tool samples frames at your chosen rate. Smaller width and lower frame rate mean a dramatically smaller GIF.
Encode & preview
Frames are quantised to a 256-colour palette and packed into an animated GIF by a background worker, so the page stays responsive. Preview it, then download.
The GIF Format, Honestly
GIF turned 30 before the first iPhone shipped. It survives because it plays literally everywhere — no player, no codec, no click-to-play — and because it loops silently. But its 1987 heritage shows, and pretending otherwise would be a disservice.
Built for
- Docs & READMEs — GitHub, Confluence and Markdown render GIFs natively
- Chat & email — Slack, Teams and most email clients autoplay them
- UI demos & bug reports — a looping five-second clip beats ten screenshots
- Reaction clips — short, silent, looping by design
Hard limits
- 256 colours — gradients can band; photos lose depth
- No audio — the format has no sound track at all
- Big files — a 10-second 480p GIF often weighs 5–10 MB where an MP4 would be 1 MB
- Long clips hurt — past ~15 seconds, consider whether a video link serves better
GIF vs Modern Alternatives
Before you commit to a GIF, know what you're choosing — and what the alternatives cost. This comparison is the one most tool pages skip, because every alternative column makes GIFs look worse on paper.
| Animated GIF | MP4 / WebM video | CSS animation | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plays everywhere without a player | Yes — even email | Mostly — no in many email clients | Modern browsers only |
| Loops silently by default | Yes | Needs attributes | Yes |
| File size for 10 s of content | Largest | Smallest by far | Tiny (if simple) |
| Full colour and audio | 256 colours, no sound | Yes | Code-defined graphics only |
| Works in Markdown & READMEs | Yes | Platform-dependent | No |
| Editable later | Frame by frame | Re-encode needed | It's just code |
Other Well-Known Ways to Make a GIF
The right tool depends on whether you're making one GIF or a hundred, and where the source video is allowed to travel. These are the established options.
EZGIF
The most popular dedicated GIF workshop on the web — crop, caption, optimise, reverse, split. Free and genuinely good, but your video is uploaded to their servers to be processed.
ezgif.com ↗GIPHY
The GIF platform — a search engine and creation studio rolled into one, owned by Facebook's parent. Best when you want to publish and share publicly rather than keep a private file.
giphy.com ↗FFmpeg
The command line does everything this tool does and more, with precise palette control: one line turns a clip into a GIF with per-frame palettes. The power option for people who live in a terminal.
ffmpeg.org ↗ScreenToGif
A free, open-source Windows app that records your screen straight to GIF — the natural choice when the source is your display rather than a video file. Local processing, installed on your machine.
screentogif.com ↗Frequently Asked Questions
Short, direct answers — the kind you can quote.
Why is my GIF so much bigger than the source video?
Because GIF compression was designed for flat 1987 graphics, not video. Modern video codecs squeeze a whole frame into a few kilobytes by storing only what changed since the previous frame, in full colour. GIF stores every frame as an optionally-compressed bitmap with a 256-colour cap. A rule of thumb: a GIF is 5–10× the size of an MP4 of the same clip. Drop the width to 320 px and the frame rate to 8 fps and the gap narrows fast.
Why do gradients look banded in my GIF?
The GIF format allows at most 256 distinct colours per frame, chosen from a palette built for your specific image. A smooth blue sky needs thousands of slightly different blues; the palette can only keep 256 of them, so similar shades collapse into visible stripes. Dithering — scattering the two nearest palette colours — hides most of it, which is what the "Colors" setting trades against encoding speed.
What length should a GIF be?
Five to ten seconds covers the overwhelming majority of good GIFs — a UI interaction, a bug reproduction, a reaction moment. Past fifteen seconds the file usually becomes too heavy for chat and email, and a video link with a timestamp serves the reader better. This tool caps length at 60 seconds for that reason.
Which frame rate should I pick?
10 fps is the sweet spot for most content: motion reads clearly, and the file stays reasonable because every extra frame is another full image stored. 15 fps looks noticeably smoother for fast motion but adds roughly 50% to the file. Below 8 fps, motion starts to stutter. Screen recordings tolerate low rates well; sports and gameplay need higher ones.
Why does my GIF have no sound?
Not a bug, not a setting — the GIF format has no audio channel, period. It was designed in 1987 for still-image interchange. If you need sound, what you want is a short MP4 or WebM, not a GIF; every platform that autoplays GIFs also autoplays muted video.
How do I put a GIF in a README or documentation?
Commit the .gif file to your repository (a docs or assets folder is customary) and embed it with standard image Markdown: . GitHub, GitLab and most documentation platforms render animated GIFs natively in place. Keep it under about 10 MB — very large GIFs make repository clones painful.
Is there a file size or length limit?
No artificial limit. The practical ceiling is memory: every captured frame lives in RAM until encoding finishes, so very long GIFs at high resolution can exhaust a phone's memory. The length cap of 60 seconds and the width options exist to keep you in safe territory.
Is my video uploaded anywhere?
No. The tool decodes your video and encodes the GIF inside this browser tab, using a background worker thread. There is no server, no API call and no analytics on your file. Verify it yourself: open your browser's developer tools, watch the Network tab and make a GIF — nothing is sent.
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