GIF Maker / Compressor
Use this free online GIF Maker to convert short video clips (MP4, MOV, WebM) into looping animated GIFs. It is useful for creating reaction GIFs for chat and social, building lightweight tutorial loops for documentation, sharing a few seconds of footage where a video player would be overkill, or capturing a UI bug for a Jira ticket. Drop a clip into the upload zone, set the frame rate, output size and start/end times, and the tool produces a GIF ready to download. Conversion runs entirely in your browser using a WebAssembly encoder — your videos never leave your device, with no upload limit and no watermark.
Click to choose or drop images (JPG/PNG)
How to Use This GIF Maker
Making a GIF takes a drop, a couple of sliders and one click.
- Drop your video clip into the upload zone or click to choose a file.
- Set the start and end times to choose which seconds of the video should become the GIF.
- Pick the output frame rate (10–15 fps is standard for GIFs) and the output width.
- Click Make GIF and wait while frames are encoded into the animated file.
- Click Download to save the looping GIF; the original video is untouched.
How This GIF Maker Works
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format — a 1987 image format that supports animation by storing a sequence of frames in a single file. Each frame is a 256-colour palette image, which is why GIFs look chunkier than modern video. The maker uses two browser-based components: an HTML5 video element to decode and seek the source clip, and a WebAssembly build of gif.js to encode the frame sequence into the final GIF. When you set the start and end times the maker plays the video silently, captures one frame every (1/fps) seconds onto an off-screen Canvas, palette-quantises each frame down to 256 colours using a Median Cut algorithm, and writes the frames into the GIF container with the chosen loop count. Higher frame rates and larger sizes produce smoother but bigger GIFs — 480 pixels wide at 12 fps is a good balance for most uses. Because everything happens locally there is no upload limit and no watermark, which makes the tool well suited to private clips like UI bug captures and pre-launch product footage.
Last updated: May 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are my GIFs so big?
GIF is inefficient compared to MP4. Lowering FPS, reducing width, or shortening duration helps. For tiny files, consider WebM or MP4 instead.
What FPS should I use?
10 FPS is typical for shareable GIFs. 15–20 FPS looks smoother but doubles file size. 24+ FPS is rarely worth it in GIF.
Can I make a transparent GIF?
Not from this tool — the output uses a single colour palette. Transparent GIFs need an editor that handles per-frame palettes and disposal methods.
Why does the colour look off?
GIF's 256-colour palette can't represent the full range of source frames. Lowering the quality value uses a richer palette per frame; raising it shrinks the file.
Is everything kept private?
Yes — gif.js runs in your browser using web workers. Your images and videos never reach a server.