🖼️ Video to GIF Maker ☆

Convert video to GIF in your browser

Free Video to GIF Maker turns any video file into an optimized GIF without uploading it. The conversion uses FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly with a two-pass palette, so colors stay sharp while the file stays small.

How to make a GIF

• Drop an MP4, MOV or WebM file above
• Trim the clip and set frame rate, size and looping
• Convert and download your GIF

Why the two-pass palette matters

GIF is limited to 256 colors. The tool first analyzes your clip to build a custom palette, then renders every frame with it, the same technique professional encoders use, avoiding the muddy, dithered look of naive conversions.

Everything runs locally: your video never leaves your device.

How video to GIF conversion works

The chosen segment is decoded with FFmpeg in the browser, scaled to the output size and encoded as an animated GIF with a palette generated from the frames themselves, which is what keeps colors accurate instead of washed out. Frame rate, dimensions and start/end points are configurable, and looping is built into the format. GIFs are large by nature, so short clips at moderate sizes produce the best results.

Specifications and compatibility

Privacy: videos stay on your device

Clips are read and encoded locally with WebAssembly: nothing is transmitted, stored or logged, and closing the tab clears the memory.

GIF tips

• Keep clips under about 6 seconds, GIF size grows fast with duration.
• 10-15 fps is enough for most animations and much smaller than 30.
• Resize to the final display width; oversized GIFs are rarely needed.
• Prefer MP4/WebM when the destination supports video, far smaller.
• Use GIF for reactions, previews and places where video tags are blocked.

Related: browse the conversion tools for trimming, compression and audio.

File size math: frames, dimensions and duration

GIF is an uncompressed-era format, so its size grows quickly and predictably. A useful rule of thumb: width × height × frame count ÷ compression factor. Halving the width and height cuts the pixel count to a quarter, which is why scaling a 1080p clip to 480 pixels wide often turns a 40 MB file into a few megabytes. Frame rate matters just as much: dropping from 30 to 12 frames per second removes more than half the frames, and GIF animation rarely looks worse because the format is not designed for smooth motion anyway. Duration is the third lever, every extra second adds its full share of frames, so trimming a clip before converting is more effective than any post-processing. The 256-colour palette is the other hard limit: gradients and skin tones band visibly, and dithering hides the bands at the cost of a noisier texture and larger files. If you need photographic quality or transparency gradients, a short MP4 or a WebP animation will be several times smaller; GIF remains the safe choice for short, simple loops that must play everywhere, including chat apps and email clients that block video.