Video to GIF converter

How it works

1. Add the clip. Drag a video file onto the box or pick it from your files. MP4, MOV, WebM, AVI and MKV all work.
2. Trim. Move the two handles to the seconds worth keeping. This one setting decides the file size more than everything else combined.
3. Choose a preset, or set width, frame rate and colours yourself. Presets cover the usual targets, such as a Discord emoji or a file under 2 MB.
4. Convert and download. The first run of a visit takes a few extra seconds while the encoder loads.

If you mostly work with phone footage, there is a page tuned for that case: MP4 to GIF.

Where the weight comes from

A GIF has almost no motion compression. Each frame is stored nearly whole, using a palette of at most 256 colours, so three settings multiply together into the final size.

Length is the bluntest. Cut six seconds to three and the file halves. Width comes next, and it counts twice because pixels grow with the square of it: going from 640 to 480 removes about 44% of them. Frame rate is the one people forget. At 15 frames a second instead of 30 there are half as many frames, and most footage still looks smooth.

Colour count depends on the material. Film grain, skies and gradients need all 256 or they show visible bands. Screen recordings, cartoons and flat graphics usually look the same at 64 and come out lighter.

No caps, and the one real limit

Online converters that do the work on their own servers have to ration it. The best-known one accepts files up to 200 MB and links the maximum length to the frame rate: a minute at 5 frames a second, thirty seconds at 10, less above that. Reasonable rules when someone else pays for the processing.

Here the processing happens on your computer, so there is no file size cap, no length cap and no frame cap. What remains is the memory a browser tab is allowed to use, roughly 2 GB. A long clip at full resolution can reach it; if that happens you get a plain message saying so, and trimming first solves it.

Questions