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Convert video to GIF

Turn a clip of an MP4 or other video into a looping GIF with your size, frame rate and caption, made in your browser.

Drop a video to make a GIFMP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, AVI · pick any part up to 30 s
Choose videoProcessed on your device — never uploaded
Runs in your browser · no uploadHow it works

How to use Video to GIF

  1. 1

    Drop a video

    Add an MP4, MOV, WebM or other clip of up to 500 MB. The first five seconds are selected to start with.

  2. 2

    Pick the moment

    Drag the selection on the filmstrip or type a start time and length; free GIFs can be up to 30 seconds long.

  3. 3

    Style the loop

    Choose width, 10–25 fps, speed from 0.5× to 2×, colours, a 1:1, 4:5, 9:16 or 16:9 crop and an optional caption.

  4. 4

    Make and download

    Press Make GIF (or Make WEBP, Make loop), watch the result loop on screen, then save it as GIF, animated WebP or a silent MP4 loop.

Limits and Pro

Clips of up to 30 seconds from videos of up to 500 MB and 10 minutes, at up to 800 px wide.

Pro makes animations of up to 2 minutes from videos as large as 4 GB. See Pro

About Video to GIF

Video to GIF turns a few seconds of video into a silent, endlessly looping animation. GIF output is built in two passes: ffmpeg first analyses the clip and generates the best 256-, 128- or 64-colour palette for it, then maps every frame to that palette with ordered dithering, which keeps gradients and skin tones far cleaner than a generic palette. Because GIF stores every frame as a full image with at most 256 colours, size grows quickly with width, frame rate and length; the tool warns you when a GIF is getting big. Animated WebP keeps more colours at a fraction of the size, and the MP4 option makes an H.264 loop without sound, which is usually the smallest of the three and what many chat apps convert GIFs into anyway.

You can speed the clip up or slow it down, play it once, three times or forever, crop to a square, portrait or widescreen frame and move the crop window, and burn in a caption in white or another colour at the top or bottom, meme style. The width can go from 240 to 800 pixels, never larger than the source.

Typical uses are reaction GIFs, product demos for a README or a bug report, slide decks and email newsletters, where video won't autoplay. The result has no audio, a GIF can't show more than 256 colours at once, and long or wide GIFs quickly reach tens of megabytes, so keep clips short and around 480 pixels wide.

Privacy

Frames are cut, cropped, captioned and encoded by ffmpeg.wasm in a Web Worker inside this tab, and the caption is drawn on a canvas on your device. The video never leaves your computer or phone. The 31 MB ffmpeg core is downloaded from the jsDelivr CDN the first time you make an animation, then cached; that request carries no frames or text.

Features

Clean palettes

Two-pass palette generation and dithering keep gradients and skin tones smooth.

Crop for any feed

Square, 4:5, 9:16 or 16:9 with a movable crop window.

Meme captions

Burn in bold outlined text at the top or bottom, in any colour.

Speed and loops

Play at 0.5× to 2×, loop forever, once or three times.

Video to GIF: frequently asked questions

How long can my GIF be?
On the free plan a single animation can be up to 30 seconds long, taken from any point of a video of up to 10 minutes; Pro allows clips of up to two minutes. In practice, GIFs work best at 2 to 6 seconds: chat apps and social networks often cap GIF uploads at about 10 to 15 MB, which a 480-pixel GIF can pass after roughly 10 seconds.
Why is my GIF file so big?
GIF is an old format that compresses badly: each frame is stored as a full picture with up to 256 colours. To shrink it, lower the width to 320 or 480 pixels, drop the frame rate to 10 or 15, use 64 or 128 colours, or shorten the clip. Animated WebP is often a third of the size, and an MP4 loop can be ten times smaller.
Can I add text to the GIF?
Yes. Type up to 120 characters in the Caption field and choose top or bottom, small, medium or large, and a colour. The text is drawn in bold with a dark outline, the classic meme look, and burned into every frame, so it shows in any app. Long captions wrap onto several lines automatically to fit the width of the animation.
Should I choose GIF, WebP or MP4?
Choose GIF when it must play everywhere, including email, Slack, GitHub READMEs and older apps. Animated WebP looks better and is much smaller, and works in all current browsers, WhatsApp and Telegram, but some desktop apps still can't open it. The MP4 loop is the smallest and smoothest; use it on websites and social networks that accept video, with autoplay, mute and loop set.
Does the GIF loop and does it have sound?
GIF and WebP loop forever by default; under Loop you can also make them play once or three times. None of the formats include sound, because GIF and animated WebP can't store audio and the MP4 option is made silent so it can autoplay in browsers and chat apps. For a clip with sound, trim the video instead and share it as a regular video.

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