GIF Maker

How GIF Maker works

Add pictures in the order they should play and each one becomes a frame of an animated GIF that plays in any browser, chat app, email or document. Set how long each frame stays on screen, from a tenth of a second for a quick flip-book to three seconds for a slideshow, and whether the animation loops forever, plays once or plays three times.

Every frame has the same size: the width you choose, in the shape of the first picture. Pictures of another shape are either fitted whole, with the background colour around them, or scaled to fill the frame with their edges cropped. Nothing is enlarged beyond the first picture's own width. A transparent background keeps the see-through parts of PNG images the way GIF can: each pixel is either fully transparent or fully solid.

GIF can show only 256 colours, so the maker builds one palette of the colours that best represent all of your pictures together, which stops colours flickering from frame to frame. Dithering, on by default, mixes neighbouring pixels to imitate the colours in between and keeps photos and gradients smooth; turn it off for flat graphics, screenshots and logos, where it only adds noise and file size.

Pictures are turned into a GIF by a small encoder that is part of this page, so nothing is uploaded and, for the formats your browser reads itself, such as JPG, PNG, WebP, BMP and AVIF, nothing extra is downloaded. HEIC photos from iPhones are first decoded by a HEIC reader that downloads the first time it is needed. An animated GIF added as a picture contributes its first frame.

You can also add one video instead of pictures. It is turned into a GIF by ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, which downloads once, about 32 MB, and is cached: one frame is taken every frame delay, at the width you choose, with a palette built from the clip. For finer control over frame rate, Video to GIF does the same job with more settings.

GIF Maker options explained

When to use it

Make a GIF to show the steps of a process or a before and after in a support article or README, to turn a burst of photos into a short animation, to build a simple animated banner or sticker, to show a product from every side, or to post a slideshow in a chat app that plays GIFs but not videos.

Keep GIFs small: a few frames at 480 pixels is usually well under a megabyte, but dozens of large photos can run to many megabytes. For long animations or smooth video, an MP4 is far smaller.

About the GIF encoder

GIF is a format from 1987 that every browser, chat app and email program still plays, which is why it is still used for short animations. Each frame is a picture of up to 256 colours, compressed with LZW, a lossless method, and stored with a delay in hundredths of a second; a small extension block, first added by Netscape, says how many times to loop. The encoder on this page writes exactly that: it chooses one shared palette by median cut, a classic method that splits the colours in your pictures into 256 groups of similar shades, maps every pixel to the nearest palette colour, optionally with Floyd and Steinberg's dithering, and compresses each frame. It runs in the page itself, so pictures your browser can open are made into a GIF without downloading anything more, and nothing leaves your device.

GIF Maker troubleshooting

The pictures play in the wrong order

Frames follow the order the pictures were added. Reload the page and add them again in order, or name them 01, 02 and so on and select them together.

Photos look grainy

That is dithering imitating colours GIF cannot show, usually the better look for photos. Turn it off for a cleaner, flatter result.

"Add either pictures or one video"

A GIF is made either from pictures or from a single video. Make separate GIFs, or use Video to GIF for a clip.

How to use GIF Maker, step by step

1. Press "Choose pictures" or drag files onto the box.
2. Set the options if you need to; the defaults suit most uses.
3. Press "Make GIF". The work happens on your device.
4. Save the result with its download button.

Is it safe to do this online?

With most online tools, "online" means your file is uploaded to a company's server, processed there and kept for a while before it is deleted. Here it is not. The page downloads the tool's code to your browser, and your file is read and processed inside the tab on your own device. It is never sent to TapToConvert or anyone else.

You can check this yourself: once the page and its engine have loaded, turn off Wi-Fi and the tool still works. That also means there is no queue, no daily limit and no file size cap set by a server; the only limit is the memory your browser gives a single tab.