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VideoToGif help

Turn part of a video into an animated GIF, entirely inside your browser.

What this does

A GIF is a short, silent, looping animation that plays anywhere: in a chat window, in a bug report, in a README, in an email. This makes one out of any video you have.

The whole thing runs in this tab. Your video is never uploaded, and nothing is stored anywhere.

How to use it

  1. Drop a video onto the page, or click Open video.
  2. Drag the IN and OUT handles on the strip to pick the part you want. Keep it short: a few seconds makes a good GIF.
  3. Pick a width and a frame rate, or just leave the defaults.
  4. Press Make GIF, look at the result, then press Save GIF.

If your GIF looks blurry

Almost always the cause is width. A GIF made 480 pixels wide from a 1080p video is throwing away most of the picture, and fine detail like text goes soft.

Set Quality to Best (full size) and the GIF keeps the original dimensions. The figure under the controls tells you the exact output size and what percentage of the original it is, before you spend time encoding.

The trade is file size: full size costs several MB per second. If it has to be small AND sharp, shorten the clip rather than shrinking the picture.

Why GIFs get so big

A GIF stores whole frames rather than just what changed, so file size grows with the number of frames and the size of the picture. Ten seconds at full size can easily be 50 MB, which most places will refuse.

Three things bring it down, in the order worth trying: shorten the clip, lower the frame rate, then reduce the width. Ten frames a second still reads as smooth motion for most clips.

Fitting a size limit

The "Fit in" box has the real limits for the common places people post: Discord, Slack, email, a GitHub README. Pick one and the settings are adjusted automatically before the GIF is made.

The size shown before you press the button is an estimate, because how well a GIF compresses depends on the picture itself. After your first GIF from a given video, the estimate becomes much more accurate for that video.

The extra options

Most people never need these. Open "More options" if you want them.

The first GIF takes longer

The first time you make a GIF, the page downloads the video engine, about 31 MB. That happens once and is then kept on your device, so every GIF after that starts straight away.

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Common questions

Is my video uploaded?
No. Everything happens inside this tab on your own device. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.
Why is there no sound?
GIFs cannot carry audio. That is a limitation of the format itself, not of this tool. If you need sound, keep it as a video.
How long can the clip be?
There is no hard limit, but GIFs are meant to be short. Past about thirty seconds the file gets unwieldy and the encode gets slow. A warning appears when a clip is long enough to be slow.
Why did Copy image only copy one frame?
Browsers will not put an animated GIF on the clipboard; only still images are allowed. Use Save GIF to get the animation.
Can I use this offline?
Yes, once the page and the engine have loaded once.
What video formats work?
Anything your browser can play, which covers mp4, mov, m4v, webm and usually mkv.