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Video to GIF
Free online video to GIF converter. Create optimized GIF animations from video files with custom settings, all processed locally in your browser.
Perfect for creating shareable animations for social media, forums, or messaging apps from your videos.
How to use Video to GIF
- Upload your video file
- Set the dimensions, framerate, and duration for your GIF
- Adjust quality settings to balance file size and appearance
- Click "Create GIF" to convert
- Download your new GIF animation
Why GIF files get so large
GIF stores every frame as a separate paletted image with no motion compression, so file size scales almost linearly with frame count and dimensions. A few seconds of full-size video can easily exceed 20MB as a GIF.
The two settings that actually control size are frame rate and dimensions. Frame rate here ranges from 5 to 30fps and defaults to 12, which reads as smooth for most screen recordings and reaction clips. Dropping from 24 to 12fps roughly halves the file.
How the colours are chosen
Conversion runs a two-pass palette process: the first pass analyses the clip and builds an optimal colour table, the second maps frames onto it with dithering. This is why output looks considerably better than a naive conversion at the same size.
GIF is limited to 256 colours per frame, and the lower quality preset narrows that to 64. Flat graphics and screen recordings survive this well. Gradients, skies, and film footage show visible banding — that is the format, not the encoder.
Questions
- Why does my GIF have no sound?
- The GIF format cannot store audio at all. If you need sound, keep the clip as MP4 or WebM.
- How do I make the GIF smaller?
- Reduce dimensions first, then frame rate, then the quality preset. Trimming the clip shorter helps most of all, since size scales with frame count.
- Why does conversion take so long?
- Encoding runs entirely in your browser through WebAssembly, which is slower than a native application, and the palette process reads the clip twice. Longer or larger clips take proportionally longer.