Turns a section of an MP4 into an animated GIF. The frames are decoded and the GIF is written in this tab, so there is no upload, no queue and no watermark — which is what most free GIF converters are actually selling you a way around.
What GIF costs you
256 colours per frame. Video is millions. Gradients, skies and skin tones band visibly, and nothing can prevent it — the palette is part of the format. Dithering trades that banding for noise, which sometimes looks better and always makes the file larger.
No real interframe compression. Modern video stores what changed between frames; GIF essentially stores each frame. That is why a ten-second clip becomes tens of megabytes while the source MP4 was two.
No audio. GIF has never had any and never will.
The upside is that a GIF plays inline everywhere without a play button — in an email, a README, a chat, a forum post. That is the entire reason the format survives, and it is a good one.
Keeping the file usable
Width. Halving it quarters the pixel count and roughly quarters the file. 480 pixels is plenty for most purposes and 320 is fine for chat.
Length. Every second at 12 fps is twelve more full pictures. Trim to the part that matters — the trim controls are on this page, so no separate editing step is needed.
Frame rate. 10–15 fps reads as smooth for most footage. Below 8 it starts to stutter; above 20 you are paying a lot for very little.
The practical limits worth knowing: Slack stops animating GIFs above about 2 MB, most forums cap around 5, GitHub allows 10, and Discord's free tier 10. A conversion above 15 MB is flagged in the notes.
Palette: per frame or shared
Per frame (the default) recomputes the palette for each frame, so each is as accurate as it can be. The cost is a palette stored per frame, and occasionally a subtle colour shimmer between frames when the scene barely changes.
Shared computes one palette from the first frame and uses it throughout. Smaller files and no shimmer — good for a fixed camera on a fixed scene, poor when the scene or the lighting changes, because later frames are forced into the first frame's colours.
Should it be a GIF at all
Use a GIF when the destination genuinely will not take video — an email signature, an older forum, a Word document, a system that only accepts images. Otherwise keep the video.
Other names for this
Also searched as “video to gif”, “mp4 to animated gif”, “make a gif from video”.
Questions
- Why is the GIF bigger than the video?
- GIF has no meaningful interframe compression — it essentially stores every frame as its own picture. Ten to twenty times the source is normal, which is why width, length and frame rate all matter.
- Is there a watermark?
- No, and there is no length limit or sign-up either. There is nothing to meter because the conversion costs us nothing.
- How do I make it smaller?
- Reduce the width first — it is quadratic. Then trim the length, then lower the frame rate. Dropping to 128 colours also helps and is barely visible on most footage.
- Is the audio included?
- No. GIF has no audio track and never has. Use the MP4 to MP3 tool if you want the sound separately.
- It says my video cannot be decoded.
- It is almost certainly HEVC, which iPhones record by default and which no browser decodes outside Safari on Apple hardware. Re-export it as H.264, or set Settings → Camera → Formats to “Most Compatible” before recording. Extracting the audio from the same file still works, because that never touches the video track.
- Is my video uploaded?
- No. The decoding and the GIF encoding both happen in this tab. Video files are large, which is exactly why upload-based converters queue and cap them — none of that applies here because nothing is sent anywhere.