RunToolRunVideo to GIF
Convert Video files to GIF format.
How to Convert Video to GIF
Select a short video
Click the upload area or drop an MP4, MOV or WebM clip — short segments work best.
Conversion runs in your browser
Frames are extracted and assembled into an animated GIF on your device.
Download the GIF
Save an animation that plays automatically everywhere — no player needed.
GIF is a 1987 format and it shows
A GIF stores a sequence of frames, each limited to a palette of 256 colours, compressed with a lossless algorithm designed for flat graphics. It has no concept of a modern video codec's inter-frame prediction, which is why a five-second clip that occupies 400 KB as MP4 can occupy 8 MB as GIF.
The 256-colour limit is the visible constraint. Video frames typically contain tens of thousands of distinct colours, so converting means choosing a palette and mapping everything onto it. Smooth gradients — skies, skin, shadows — become banded, and dithering trades that banding for visible noise. Neither is a bug; both are what the format allows.
The three settings that determine the file size
Duration, dimensions and frame rate multiply together, and each is a direct lever. Halving the width and height removes three-quarters of the pixels per frame. Dropping from 30 to 15 frames per second halves the frame count and is barely noticeable on most footage. Trimming two seconds off a ten-second clip removes a fifth of the file.
Because they multiply, small reductions compound: 480 pixels wide at 12 frames per second for four seconds is a fundamentally different file from 800 pixels at 24 frames for eight seconds, even though neither set of numbers sounds extreme. Start by cutting duration — it is almost always the setting with the most slack.
What converts well
Short, tightly cropped clips with limited motion and few colours are what the format was accidentally good at: a UI interaction, a reaction shot, a simple animation, a two-second loop. Screen recordings in particular convert beautifully, because interface graphics are flat colour and hard edges — exactly the content GIF's compression was designed for.
Camera footage of a busy scene is the opposite. Every frame differs from the last, there is grain in every pixel, and the palette reduction has nowhere to hide. If a clip is long, detailed and full of motion, a GIF of it will be both enormous and ugly, and no setting will rescue it.
Looping, and when to use a video instead
GIFs loop by default and carry no audio, which is why they suit reaction clips and demonstrations. Looping works best when the first and last frames are visually close; otherwise each repeat begins with a jump that draws the eye.
For anything longer than a few seconds, a silently autoplaying MP4 or WebM is smaller, sharper and supported everywhere that matters — it is what social platforms actually serve when you upload a GIF to them. Choose GIF when the destination genuinely requires it: chat clients, some documentation systems, email signatures, and places where an image tag is all you are allowed.
How the conversion runs here
The work is done by a WebAssembly build of FFmpeg inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, so private recordings and internal screen captures stay on your machine — but the encoding is single-threaded, so it is meaningfully slower than a desktop tool and a long clip will make you wait.
That performance profile is another reason to trim before converting rather than after. Cutting the clip to the seconds you actually need reduces the work proportionally, and it is the same edit that produces the smallest and cleanest result anyway.