GIF Maker

How to make a GIF

1. Drop a video on the frame above, or tap Choose file. MP4, MOV and WebM all open, including iPhone videos. Got photos instead? Switch to Images → GIF, or just drop them here and the page switches for you.
2. Drag the two handles on the film strip to the moment you want. The preview loops only that part, so you see exactly what the GIF will show.
3. Pick an aspect (Original, square, 16:9, 9:16 or 4:5), a width and a frame rate. The defaults, 480 px at 12 fps on High quality, suit most chat GIFs.
4. Press Make GIF. On a laptop, a 10-second clip takes a few seconds. Then download it, or tap Share on your phone to send it straight to an app.

Video or photos: which mode?

Start from a video when the motion already exists: a reaction, a pet doing something stupid, a screen recording of a bug you want to show a colleague. You pick a stretch of the clip and the tool samples it at your frame rate.

Start from photos when you have separate pictures and want them to play in sequence. Think a product shot from four angles, a before-and-after, or frames you drew yourself. The Images → GIF tab puts them on a strip you can reorder, with its own duration for every picture. Images to GIF has the same tool with a longer guide.

Already have a GIF? Then you probably want to caption it or convert it to MP4.

What makes a GIF look good

A GIF frame can hold at most 256 colors. A phone video has millions. So every GIF maker has to choose which 256 to keep, and that choice decides whether skin looks like skin or like a paint-by-numbers kit.

We pick the colors by looking at up to 32 frames spread across your selection, not just the first one. That matters when the lighting changes halfway through. The colors are grouped in a perceptual color space (OkLab), which spends more of the 256 slots on differences your eye notices.

Then comes dithering. Where a smooth gradient falls between two palette colors, the encoder mixes them in a fine pattern so you see a blend instead of a hard band. It’s the grain you notice up close. Turn it off and skies get stripes.

Last, the frame-to-frame trick: pixels that didn’t change since the last frame are stored as transparent, so they cost almost nothing. A screen recording where only the cursor moves compresses beautifully. A concert clip with sweeping lights doesn’t. That’s also what the Quality setting controls: how much a pixel may change before it gets redrawn.

How does it compare? We ran a 10-second phone clip through this encoder and through ffmpeg’s standard high-quality GIF settings at the same size and frame rate. Ours came out about a fifth smaller with a slightly higher similarity score (SSIM 0.954 vs 0.934). That’s one clip and one synthetic test, not a law of nature, but it’s why we’re comfortable saying smaller files, same or better quality, in our tests.