How to convert a video to a GIF
- Open the video. Drop it on the dark panel or tap Choose a video. On a phone you can pick straight from your camera roll.
- Trim. Drag Start and End. The film strip under the preview highlights the part you're keeping.
- Frame it. Crop to square, 4:5, 16:9 or 9:16 and set the width. This is the setting that moves file size most.
- Tune the look. Frame rate, number of colours and dithering, with the preview updating as you go.
- Add words. A bold top or bottom caption, a small corner watermark, or AI caption ideas if you're stuck.
- Loop it. Forward, reverse or boomerang; forever or a set number of plays.
- Make GIF and download. The result shows its exact size and which platforms it fits.
What happens on your device
Your browser's own video decoder seeks to each frame time, the frame is drawn onto a canvas (cropped, scaled and captioned), and a colour quantiser picks the best 256 colours or fewer for the clip. Each frame is then mapped to that palette, optionally dithered, and written with LZW compression by gifenc, a small JavaScript GIF encoder. With one palette for the whole clip, pixels that didn't change since the previous frame are stored as transparent, which often cuts the file by a third or more on clips with a still background.
Files the browser can't decode, such as AVI or MKV, go through ffmpeg.wasm, FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, also running locally. There's no server step, no queue and no copy of your video anywhere else.
Honest limits of GIF
- 256 colours per frame. Skin tones, skies and dark scenes get banding or a dot pattern. See why, and how dithering helps.
- Big files. GIF has no motion compression, so it's routinely 5 to 20 times larger than the source MP4 at the same size.
- Timing in hundredths of a second. 12, 20 and 25 fps play evenly; 15 and 30 fps need alternating delays. Frame timing explained.
- Phone memory. Frames are held uncompressed while encoding. A 1080 px wide, 10-second, 24 fps GIF is billions of bytes of pixels; phones will refuse long before that.
- No sound. GIF has no audio track.
Questions
Is VideoToGif free?
Yes, with no account, watermark or export cap. Your own device does the work, so there is no server bill to pass on.
Are my videos uploaded?
No. The file is decoded by your browser (or by ffmpeg.wasm running in your browser) and encoded to GIF in this tab. You can switch off Wi-Fi after the page loads and it still works for common formats. Only the optional caption helper sends the words you type to an AI model.
Which video formats work?
MP4, MOV, WebM and M4V load directly in most browsers. AVI, MKV, and codecs your browser cannot play (such as HEVC in Firefox) are converted locally with ffmpeg.wasm first, limited to the first 60 seconds.
How big will my GIF be?
The meter under the settings shows an estimate from a real trial encode of sample frames, checked against common platform limits. After export you see the exact size. As a rough guide, a 3-second, 480 px, 12 fps clip is often 1 to 4 MB.
Why is my GIF so much larger than the video?
GIF compresses each frame separately with lossless LZW and a 256-colour palette. Video codecs store only changes between frames. Lower the width first, then fps, then length.
Does it work on phones?
Yes, in current Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Samsung Internet. Phones have less memory, so keep long or wide GIFs modest; the meter warns you when a setting gets heavy.
Can I make an animated WebP instead?
Yes, under Format. WebP keeps full colour and is typically much smaller, but many apps only keep GIFs animated. Safari cannot encode WebP, so that option needs Chrome, Edge or Firefox.