How to turn a video into a GIF
- Drop an MP4, M4V or MOV into the box above. The line underneath shows the real dimensions, length and frame rate of the file.
- Set From and To to the part you want. Keep it short — GIF size follows length almost directly.
- Either choose the settings yourself, or switch to Fit a size limit and pick the ceiling you have to meet.
- Press Make GIF. The result plays on the page with its size and settings beside it, so you can judge quality and size together before downloading.
Why "fit a size limit" is the setting that matters
Almost nobody converting a video to a GIF wants a particular frame rate. They want a GIF that will go through Discord, or a forum, or an email, and the number in that sentence is a file size. Yet every converter asks for the inputs and reports the size as an afterthought, leaving you to guess your way down: try 15 frames a second, too big, try 10, still too big, try smaller dimensions, and so on, re-encoding by hand each time.
This tool turns that around. Give it the limit and it does the guessing — encoding, measuring, and stepping down in the order that costs the least visible quality:
| Step | What it changes | What you notice |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fewer colours: 256 → 128 → 64 → 32 | Banding in gradients and skies; often nothing at all on screen recordings |
| 2 | Lower frame rate, down to 5 fps | Motion becomes steppy |
| 3 | Smaller dimensions, down to 40% | Softer, smaller picture |
| 4 | Lossy compression as a last resort | Visible speckling |
When it lands under your limit it stops, and then it tells you what it tried and rejected on the way. That list is the point: if your GIF came back at 6 frames a second you should know that it did, and why, rather than wondering later why the animation looks wrong.
Why a GIF is so much larger than the video
A video codec stores one frame and then only what changed. GIF cannot do this. It stores whole pictures, each limited to 256 colours, compressed with a scheme built in 1987 for flat graphics rather than film. A five second clip that is 500 KB as an MP4 can be 8 MB as a GIF, and that is not a fault in any converter — it is the format.
The practical consequences are worth knowing before you start:
- Length costs the most. Ten seconds is twice the bytes of five. Cutting the range is always the cheapest saving.
- Frame rate costs nearly as much. 20 fps is twice the frames of 10, and most people cannot tell them apart in a chat window.
- Dithering makes files bigger, not smaller. It scatters the colour error so gradients look smooth, but the scattered pixels destroy the repetition GIF compression depends on — sometimes adding half again to the size. On real footage it usually earns its keep; on screen recordings it rarely does.
Where the frames come from
The frames are decoded out of the video directly rather than screenshotted from a player, which is what makes the frame rate you ask for the frame rate you actually get. If you want the individual pictures rather than an animation, video to frames exports them as PNG or JPG and shows the frame count so you can confirm none was duplicated.
No sound, and no watermark
GIF has no audio track at all, so converting a clip whose point is what someone says will lose exactly that. If you need the sound as well, extract audio from video copies it out of the file without re-encoding it. Nothing is added to the image here: no watermark, no logo, no sign-up.
Already have a GIF that is too big?
That is a different job with its own page. Compress GIF takes an existing GIF and shrinks it, including hitting an exact limit such as Discord's 256 KB for custom emoji. And if the limit you are fighting is stated in KB, it is worth knowing that the number may not mean what you think — there are two kilobytes in circulation and they differ by 2.4%.