Video to GIF, without uploading the video

Pick the seconds you want and how big it should be. Up to 30 seconds at the small size and 5 at the large one, because that is where a GIF stops being something you can post. No signup, no watermark, nothing sent anywhere.

Drop your video here

or click to browse. Up to 12 seconds at this size — a longer GIF would be bigger than anywhere you could post it. Stays on your computer.

A size you can post

Width and frame rate are one choice, so the number on the button is the size of the file. No surprise 40 MB.

One palette for the clip

The colours are chosen from the whole clip and then applied, rather than guessed per frame. Less crawl, smaller file.

Nothing is uploaded

It runs in this tab. Cut the network once it starts and the GIF still appears.

No account, no watermark

No trial, no export limit, no logo burned into the corner. Ads pay for the site.

Why a GIF gets so big, and what this does about it

A GIF is a stack of pictures. There is no motion compression worth the name — a frame where nothing moved still costs something — and each frame is limited to 256 colours. So the size is close to a multiplication: width, times height, times how many frames there are. Ten seconds of 1080p at 30 frames a second is tens of megabytes, which is why every tool that offers this either caps it or quietly hands you something enormous.

Two of those three numbers are the only ones worth turning down, so the three buttons turn them down together. Small is 320 pixels wide at 10 frames a second, Balanced is 480 at 12, Large is 640 at 15. The height follows your video’s shape and is never enlarged past what the source had. The seconds each button allows follow from the same arithmetic: measured on a 60-second 1080p clip, the three wrote 0.27, 0.83 and 1.98 MB for every second of GIF, so they are capped at 30, 12 and 5 seconds to keep the bad case near 10 MB.

The third saving is the palette. Letting the encoder pick 256 colours afresh for every frame makes a background shimmer as the choices change, and it compresses badly. This tool runs the clip twice: once to work out one palette that suits all of it, and once to draw the frames onto that palette. It costs a second pass over a clip that is, by design, short.

Picking the seconds

Open “Only want part of it?” and type where to begin — 0:12, or just 12 — and how many seconds to take. Leave them alone and you get as many seconds as the size you picked allows. If the video ends sooner, that is what you get, and the result says how much it actually captured.

What it will not do

No sound. The format has nowhere to put any. If that is what you were after, the trimmer keeps it and the MP3 tool extracts it.

Gradients will band. 256 colours per frame is the ceiling of the format. A screen recording of text comes out perfectly; a sunset does not.

Past the cap it refuses, rather than quietly handing back something enormous. 30 seconds at Small, 12 at Balanced, 5 at Large.

No animated WebP or APNG. Both are much smaller and neither pastes into as many places as a GIF does.

Questions people ask

Why does the length limit change when I pick a different size?

Because the limit is really about megabytes, not seconds. Measured on a 60-second 1080p clip through this exact engine, Small writes about 0.27 MB per second of GIF, Balanced about 0.83, and Large about 1.98 — so the same 30 seconds would be 8 MB, 25 MB or 59 MB. Each button therefore allows the number of seconds that keeps its worst case near 10 MB: 30, 12 and 5. Quiet footage comes out well under those numbers; the caps are set for the bad case, because that is the one that ruins the result.

Why does my GIF have no sound?

GIF has never carried audio. There is nowhere in the format to put it. If the sound is the part you wanted, the video trimmer keeps it, and the video to MP3 tool takes it out on its own.

Why do the colours look banded?

Each frame of a GIF can hold 256 colours at most. This tool builds one palette from the whole clip first and then maps every frame onto it, which is the best a GIF can do, but a sunset or a smooth gradient will still show steps. That is the format rather than the conversion.

Is my video uploaded?

No. The conversion runs inside this tab on your own device. You can turn your network off after it starts and the GIF will still appear.

What size does the GIF come out?

The width is whatever the preset says — 320, 480 or 640 pixels — and the height follows your video’s shape. It is never made larger than the source. The frame rate is dropped to 10, 12 or 15, because at GIF’s frame sizes the difference between 15 and 30 is mostly file size.

My GIF still came out bigger than I expected.

The caps are set on measured worst-case footage, and the worst case is motion: a handheld pan changes most of the picture every frame and there is nothing for the format to reuse. A screen recording of a static page at the same settings can be a tenth of the size. The number under the length box is a rough guess for this reason and says so.

Can I make an animated WebP instead? It would be far smaller.

Not here, not yet. It would be smaller — often by five times — but a GIF drops into a chat box, a forum post and a bug report and plays; an animated WebP still does not everywhere. This tool makes the one you can actually paste.

Other tools