Video to GIF
Turn up to 20 seconds of any video into a looping GIF, with the file size estimated before you make it.
- Free
- No sign-up
- No watermark
- Runs in your browser
Loading the tool.
How big will your GIF be?
Three settings decide it: how long the clip runs, how wide it is, and how many frames per second it shows. Length and frame rate add to the file frame by frame, because this tool stores every frame as a complete picture. These are real files this tool made from one 12-second camera clip of a person talking.
| Width | Frame size | 3 seconds (45 frames) | 10 seconds (150 frames) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 320 px | 320 × 180 | 715 KB | 3.0 MB |
| 480 px | 480 × 270 | 1.3 MB | 5.3 MB |
| 640 px | 640 × 360 | 2.0 MB | 8.2 MB |
Measured on 11 September 2026 with this tool in Chrome, on our 12-second 1280 × 720 test video of a person talking, starting at 0:00, with one 256-color palette per frame. Grainy or busy footage comes out larger and flat graphics far smaller; the estimate inside the tool is fitted to these measurements and one portrait camera clip. For scale, the entire 12-second MP4, sound included, weighs 1.3 MB: less than a quarter of the 10-second GIF at 480 px. That gap is the format itself. An MP4 (H.264) stores most frames as the changes from the frames around them and keeps millions of colors, while a GIF compresses each frame on its own, with at most 256 colors.
How it works
Open your video. Drop an MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV file on the box, or choose it from your device. The tool reads its length and frame size and selects the first five seconds.
Mark the moment and the look. Drag the two handles on the timeline or type a start and end time, then press Play the section to check it. Pick a width of 320, 480 or 640 px, a frame rate of 10, 15 or 20 fps, and whether the GIF loops forever or plays once.
Create it and download. Glance at the estimated size, press Create GIF and follow the progress bar. When it finishes, the GIF plays on the page with its real size, frame count and length, ready to download.
What you get
- An estimate that moves with you
- The estimate changes as you move a handle or switch a setting, so you can find a width and frame rate that suit a chat app or a forum before encoding anything.
- Timing that does not drift
- GIF counts time in hundredths of a second, and a 15 fps frame lasts 6.67 of them. Delays are rounded against the running total rather than one by one, so 45 frames last 3.00 seconds, not 3.15.
- Colors picked per frame
- Every frame gets its own palette of up to 256 colors, chosen from that frame. In our tests this stayed closer to the video than one palette for the whole clip, for files 2 to 20% larger.
- No pointless upscaling
- If your video is narrower than the width you pick, the GIF keeps the video's own width. A stretched GIF is heavier without being any sharper.
Questions people ask
How do I make a GIF from a video on my phone?
Open this page in your phone's browser, tap the box and pick the video from your gallery or files. It needs a browser with WebCodecs, which recent Chrome on Android and Safari 16.4 or newer on iPhone include. A phone has less memory than a computer, so keep the section short if it struggles.
How long can a GIF be?
Up to 20 seconds here. The format itself has no length limit, but every frame this tool writes is a full picture: on our 1280 × 720 test clip, 10 seconds at 480 px already came to 5.3 MB, and every extra second adds its own frames on top.
How do I make my GIF smaller?
Shorten it first, then lower the frame rate, then the width. 10 fps instead of 15 removes a third of the frames, and on our test clip it made the file 35% smaller. Going from 640 to 480 px cut the file by about a third, and from 480 to 320 px by more than 40%.
What quality do I lose when I convert a video to GIF?
Mostly color. A GIF frame can hold at most 256 colors, so smooth gradients such as skies and skin can show bands. The tool adds no dithering, so those bands stay flat steps instead of grainy dots. Fine detail also softens at 320 or 480 px, so pick the widest size the file can afford.
Does a GIF keep the sound of the video?
No. GIF is an image format with no audio track, so the soundtrack is left out. If what is said matters, a short video clip with captions keeps both the voice and the words on screen.
How long does it take to make a GIF?
Usually a few seconds. On our test computer in Chrome, 3 seconds at 480 px took about a second and 10 seconds at 640 px four to six seconds. Phones and older laptops take longer, and a tab left in the background is slowed down a lot.
Is my video uploaded to make the GIF?
No. Your browser decodes the frames, reduces each one to 256 colors and writes the GIF right on your device, so the video and the GIF never leave it.
Need the voice as well as the moment?
A GIF is silent by design. GPT-Video turns long videos into vertical clips that keep the sound and add captions generated from the speech, so the moment still lands when viewers watch muted.
Related
Your file is processed on your device and never uploaded.