About Video to GIF
A GIF is a sequence of still images with a palette of at most 256 colours each, and no compression between frames. That last point explains almost everything about the format: a five-second GIF is not five seconds of video, it is fifty separate images stacked in one file. Length, frame rate and dimensions all multiply the size directly, which is why a short clip can turn into a twenty-megabyte GIF without much effort.
The interesting problem is colour. Video frames routinely contain tens of thousands of distinct colours and a GIF can hold 256. The naive fix — rounding each channel to a fixed grid — destroys gradients, turning a sky into visible bands. This converter uses median cut, which repeatedly splits the colour space along whichever axis is most spread out, so the palette adapts to your footage: a mostly-blue clip spends its palette on blues rather than on colours it does not contain.
Dithering handles what is left. Instead of rounding each pixel to the nearest palette colour and accepting the banding, the rounding error is spread onto neighbouring pixels, which trades a small amount of noise for gradients that stay smooth. It is on by default and worth turning off only for flat graphics, where it adds noise to areas that were already exact.
Everything runs in your browser: the video is decoded by the same engine that plays it, frames are read through a canvas, and the GIF is assembled in JavaScript. Nothing is uploaded, which also means there is no file size limit imposed by a server — only what your device can hold in memory.
How to convert a video to GIF
Add your video
Drag in an MP4, WebM or MOV. It is read locally and never uploaded.
Choose the range
Set a start point and a length. Shorter is dramatically smaller — GIF has no compression between frames.
Set size and quality
Width, frame rate, colour count and dithering. Each one trades file size against how it looks.
Create and download
The preview is the real GIF. If it is bigger than you want, reduce the width first — it saves the most.
Getting the size down
- Reduce the width first. Size scales with area, so halving the width cuts roughly three-quarters of the pixels.
- Shorten the clip second. Every frame is a full image, so seconds cost more here than in any video format.
- Lower the frame rate third. 10fps reads as smooth for most footage; 20fps doubles the file for a difference many people cannot see.
- Reduce colours last. Going from 256 to 128 helps a little and shows first on gradients and skin tones.
- Turn dithering off only for flat graphics and screen recordings, where it adds noise without hiding any banding.
When a GIF is the wrong choice
For anything longer than a few seconds, an MP4 or WebM is smaller by an order of magnitude and looks better, because real video codecs only store what changed between frames. Most places that appear to accept GIFs — including several major social platforms — quietly convert them to video on upload anyway.
GIF is still the right answer when you need something that plays automatically and silently everywhere with no player, embeds in an email or a README, or has to work as a plain image file. Those cases are real, which is why the format refuses to die.