Video to GIF Converter – Turn a Clip into an Animated GIF in Your Browser
This video to GIF converter turns a short part of any video on your device into an animated GIF. Open an MP4, WebM or MOV file, pick the moment on a filmstrip timeline, crop it if you like, choose a frame rate, width and speed, and download the GIF. Frames are decoded by your browser's own video player and encoded inside the tab, so the video is never uploaded and the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded.
How to convert a video to GIF
- Choose a video or drop it on the page. Screen recordings, phone clips and exported edits all work.
- Drag the two handles under the filmstrip to set the start and end, type exact timecodes such as
1:02.5, or play the video and press Set start here and Set end here. Play selection loops just that part at the chosen speed. - Pick a crop shape (square, 4:5, 9:16 and more) and drag the box on the video to frame it.
- Set the frame rate, width and speed, then press Create GIF and download it.
Under the selection, one tick marks each frame the GIF will contain, so you can see how frame rate and clip length turn into a frame count before anything is encoded. A size estimate from a few sample frames appears in the summary line.
How a GIF stores time
A GIF has no frame rate. Each frame carries its own delay in hundredths of a second, and browsers play any delay of 10 ms or less as 100 ms, so 20 ms (50 fps) is the practical ceiling. Most frame rates do not divide 100 evenly: 30 fps would need 3.33 cs per frame. Rounding every frame to 3 cs makes the GIF play 11% fast, and rounding to 4 cs makes it slow. This converter spreads the rounding instead, using delays of 3, 4, 3, 3, 4, 3 … cs, so the total length matches your clip exactly. Frame rates that divide 100 (5, 10, 20, 25 and 50 fps) get one fixed delay.
Speed changes where frames are taken from the video, not the delays. At 2× and 10 fps the tool takes a frame every 0.2 s of video and shows each for 0.1 s. Slow motion cannot invent frames: at 0.25× and 30 fps, neighbouring samples often hit the same video frame, so the result looks steppy and the tool tells you when that happens.
Why video GIFs get big, and the noise tolerance setting
GIF has no motion compression and at most 256 colours per frame. The usual trick is to store only the pixels that changed since the previous frame. On video that barely helps, because camera noise and compression artefacts nudge almost every pixel slightly in every frame. The noise tolerance treats a pixel as unchanged when its colour has moved by less than the tolerance since it was last written. Comparing against the last written value rather than the previous frame means a slow fade is still updated once it drifts far enough.
GIF, MP4 and animated WebP
An MP4 of the same clip is often ten times smaller than the GIF, and animated WebP sits in between. Many platforms quietly convert uploaded GIFs back into video for that reason. GIF is still the format that plays everywhere without a player: in chat apps, README files, email and issue trackers. If a platform has an upload limit, choose it as a size budget and the tool suggests one-click fixes when the GIF is over it.
Accessibility
Video clips with strobes, gunfire or fast cuts can flash more than three times a second, which can trigger seizures. The converter checks the frames it grabbed and warns you when that seems likely. If your system asks for reduced motion, the result is shown as a still frame until you press play. When you post a GIF, add alt text that describes what happens in it, not just "animated GIF".
Formats and limits
Any video your browser can play will open. iPhone clips recorded in HEVC open in Safari but not in every browser; formats like AVI and WMV need converting to MP4 first. To keep memory use safe, the longest clip depends on the output size and frame rate, for example about 30 s at 480 × 270 and 10 fps. The GIF is encoded with the open-source gifenc library (MIT licence).