Video to GIF

How Video to GIF works

Drop any video and it is turned into an animated GIF that plays on its own, loops forever and works in every chat app, email and web page. MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, AVI, WMV, FLV and the other video formats on this site all work, including phone recordings.

The frames are sampled at the rate you choose, 12 per second by default, and scaled to 320, 480 or 640 pixels wide. A palette of 256 colours is then built from the clip itself, which is what keeps GIFs made here looking clean rather than blotchy. Sound is dropped, because GIF has no audio.

Conversion runs on your device with ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly. The engine, about 32 MB, downloads the first time and is cached. Keep clips short: GIF stores every frame as a full picture, so ten seconds at 480 pixels is usually a few megabytes.

To make a GIF from part of a longer video, cut the part you want with the video trimmer first, then convert the short clip here.

The GIF is named after the video. GIFs made from screen recordings, animations and cartoons come out especially well, because their flat colours fit within the 256-colour palette. Camera footage works too, with a little grain in smooth areas such as skies.

Video to GIF options explained

When to use it

Make a GIF to post a reaction or highlight in chat apps that autoplay GIFs, to show a product feature or bug in a support ticket or README, to put a short animation in an email where video will not play, or to share a funny moment.

For the smallest GIF, use 320 pixels and 8 to 12 frames per second, and keep the clip under five seconds. For platforms that accept video, an MP4 is far smaller than any GIF.

About this converter

This page is a shortcut to one of the most common conversions, accepting every source format that can go to the same target. It uses the same engines as the rest of the site: ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly for video and audio, and Tesseract for reading text from images, both running in your browser. The engines download the first time you press the button and are cached for later visits. If you know the exact formats involved, the dedicated pages, such as MP4 to GIF or JPG to TXT, explain the details of that pair, but the result from this page is the same.

Video to GIF troubleshooting

The GIF is huge

Lower the width and frame rate, and trim the clip shorter. GIF size grows with every frame and every pixel.

Colours look banded

GIF is limited to 256 colours. Gradients and skin tones show some banding; flat graphics and screen recordings look best.

It is slow

Long or high-resolution videos take longer to sample. Trim to the part you need first.

How to use Video to GIF, step by step

1. Press "Choose a video" or drag files onto the box.
2. Set the options if you need to; the defaults suit most uses.
3. Press "Convert to 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.