Video to GIF
Runs in your browser — your files are not uploaded to use this tool.
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Keep Video to GIF handy
Use your browser's Share menu, then “Add to Home Screen”.
Turn any clip into a GIF in your browser — no upload, no watermark, no limit.
- Drop a video in — nothing is uploaded
- Play it, and mark the start and end of the bit you want
- Set the size and frame rate, then make the GIF
About this tool
Drop a video in, scrub to the bit you want, and get a GIF. It never leaves your computer. That is the whole difference. Every other converter makes you upload first — which on a phone connection with a 400 MB clip is the slow part of the job — then caps you at 50 MB, stamps a watermark across the result, or asks for an email before the download. Here the file is read by the same machine it is sitting on. There is no upload to wait for, no size limit but your own memory, and nothing on the output that says where it was made. You choose the moment by watching it. Play the clip, press "start here", play on, press "end here" — rather than guessing timestamps and re-running until it looks right, which is what typing numbers into a box actually means. The estimated size is shown before the work starts, not after, because a GIF is uncompressed in the way people expect video not to be: ten seconds of 720p at 20 fps is around 60 MB, often larger than the video it came from. That surprise is the most common thing anybody learns the hard way about this format, so the settings start somewhere sendable and tell you what they will cost. Works with anything your browser can play — MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, AVI.
Frequently asked questions
Is my video uploaded anywhere?
No, and not as a policy — as a fact about how it works. The file is read by your own browser and the GIF is made on your own machine. There is no request that could carry it, which is also why there is no size limit and no queue to wait in.
Why is my GIF bigger than the video?
Because GIF barely compresses. It stores up to 256 colours per frame with no motion compression at all, while an MP4 stores only what changed between frames. Ten seconds of 720p at 20 fps is roughly 60 MB as a GIF. Drop the width and the frame rate — those two do almost all of the work.
Is there a watermark or a size cap?
Neither. Nothing is added to the output and there is no limit beyond what your own machine can hold. There is a cap of 300 frames, which is a memory limit rather than a paywall — past that the frames are spread across your whole clip instead of stopping early.
Which video formats work?
Anything your browser can play, which in practice means MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and most AVI files. Decoding is done by the browser itself rather than by a library we ship, so the list is as long as the one your browser supports and costs nothing to download.
What frame rate should I use?
10 to 15 is usually right. GIF stores the delay between frames in hundredths of a second, so the rates that land exactly are 20, 10 and 5 — anything else is rounded and plays slightly fast or slow. Below 10 starts to look choppy; above 20 mostly buys file size.
Can I do a whole long video?
You can point it at one, but you should not want to. A GIF of a two-minute clip is hundreds of megabytes and nothing will display it happily. The tool caps at 300 frames and spreads them across whatever range you picked, so a long selection becomes a time-lapse rather than a truncated clip.
Is there an API for this one?
No, and it is the only kind of tool here without one. Decoding video needs a browser — a server would have to install and run a video decoder for every request, which is exactly the cost that makes every other converter put a queue and an advert in front of you.
It says my browser cannot decode the video. Why?
Because the decoding is done by the browser itself rather than by a library we ship, which is what makes this instant and keeps your file off the internet. The cost is that the format list is your browser’s, not ours: some builds of Firefox and some Linux packages leave out H.264, which is what most MP4s use. Chrome, Edge or Safari will usually open the same file.
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