Video to GIF converter
Drop in a clip, pick the part you want, get a looping GIF. The video is decoded and encoded inside this tab, so nothing is uploaded anywhere.
Preset
Nothing stops you making a minute-long GIF, but weight grows with every second. Three to six is the sweet spot.
Below 10 fps looks choppy, above 20 mostly just adds weight.
Fewer colours means a smaller file. Flat cartoon footage survives 64 easily.
Target size — settings step down automatically until the GIF fits.
Pick a file to start.
How to convert a video to a GIF
- Add your clip. Drag an MP4, MOV, WebM, AVI or MKV onto the box, or pick it from disk. It is read straight from your drive.
- Trim it. Drag the two handles to the few seconds worth keeping. File size grows with every second, so this is the setting that matters most.
- Choose a preset or dial it in. Width, frame rate and colour count are the three levers. A preset sets all three for a known target like a Discord emoji.
- Convert and download. The first conversion loads the encoder, which takes a few seconds. Every run after that starts immediately.
What actually makes a GIF heavy
GIF has no motion compression worth the name: every frame is stored close to whole, in a palette of at most 256 colours. That gives you three levers, and they multiply rather than add.
Length is the blunt one — cutting six seconds to three halves the file. Width is next, because pixels scale with the square: dropping 640 to 480 removes about 44% of them. Frame rate is the one people forget; 15 fps instead of 30 halves the frame count and most footage still reads as smooth.
Colour count matters more on some clips than others. Film grain and gradients need the full 256 or they band visibly. Screen recordings, animation and flat graphics usually look identical at 64 and weigh noticeably less.
No length limit, and why that is unusual
Converters that run on a server have to ration their CPU, so they cap what you can feed them. The best-known one limits the file to 200 MB and ties maximum duration to frame rate — a minute at 5 fps, thirty seconds at 10, less as you go up. Reasonable rules for someone paying the electricity bill for your conversion.
Here that bill is yours, so the rules are different: no frame cap, no duration cap, no file size cap. The real ceiling is the memory your browser tab can hold, somewhere around 2 GB, which a long clip at full resolution can genuinely hit. If a conversion fails that way you will get told so plainly, and trimming first fixes it.
Questions
Is my video uploaded to a server?
No. The converter is a WebAssembly build of FFmpeg that runs inside this tab. Your file is read from disk into the tab's memory and the finished GIF is handed back to you. Nothing crosses the network, which also means no copy of your clip exists anywhere for us to leak or have to delete.
Why is the first conversion slower?
The encoder itself has to be downloaded once, roughly 8 MB compressed. Your browser caches it, so the second and every later conversion starts straight away.
How long can the GIF be?
As long as your machine can handle. There is no imposed limit on duration, frame count or file size. For anything past ten seconds, drop the frame rate to 10–12 fps and the width to 320–480, or the file gets unwieldy fast.
Will the GIF have a watermark?
Never. No watermark, no sign-up, no resolution held back for a paid tier.
My GIF is still too big for Discord or Slack.
Pick the matching preset and the settings step down on their own until the file fits. If it still will not, trim harder — or convert the GIF to MP4 instead, which is usually about ten times lighter.
Can I convert a YouTube or TikTok link?
No. Downloading from those platforms breaks their terms, so GIFUP only works on files you already have.