GIF maker, from your own images

How long each frame shows

A GIF stores each frame's time in hundredths of a second (GIF89a specification), so 0.333 seconds is saved as 0.33. Short times make movement, long times make a slideshow:

You can mix them: give the first or last frame a longer time so the GIF pauses there, or repeat a frame with the copy button to hold it in the middle. Two identical frames in a row are stored once with their times added, so a repeat costs almost nothing.

Fade from each frame to the next adds 6 in-between frames of 0.05 seconds to every change, and from the last frame back to the first when the GIF loops. Fades look smooth but every in-between frame is a full picture: three photos with fades made a GIF 7.5 times the size of the same three without.

Images of different shapes and sizes

Every frame of a GIF has the same size. The tool takes the shape of your first image, or the shape you pick, and fits every image into it. Show all keeps each whole image and fills the space around it with the background color. Fill, trim edges fills the frame and trims what sticks out, from the middle outward.

The size is the longer side of the GIF, from 240 to 1080 pixels. When your first image is smaller than 480 pixels, the tool starts at a smaller size so nothing gets enlarged. Phone photos are turned the right way up, as the phone recorded them, and read at the size they will have in the GIF, so even 100 large photos do not need much memory.

Making a GIF on an iPhone or Android phone

The GIF maker works in the browser you already have on your phone, with nothing to install. Tap Choose images and select several pictures at once from your photo library or files. They join the list in the order the phone passes them on, so check the order in the preview, then drag frames into place or use Sort by name. We tested the maker in Chrome and Edge, at computer and phone screen sizes.

An iPhone set to High Efficiency takes photos in HEIF, the High Efficiency Image File Format, and Most Compatible, under Settings, Camera, Formats, makes new photos JPEG instead (Apple). A browser that cannot read a HEIF photo leaves it out and names it, so you can add a JPG copy.

The finished GIF downloads like any file. Safari on an iPhone lists it under the Downloads button next to its search field and in the Downloads folder in Files (Apple); Chrome on Android saves it to the phone's download location, shown under Downloads in Chrome's menu (Google). A GIF that reaches you in Messages on an iPhone can be kept in Photos: touch and hold it, then tap Save (Apple).

Editing a GIF you already have

Add an animated GIF or WebP and, in browsers that can read its frames, every frame joins the list with its own time. In our tests Chrome and Edge both did. You can then change the timing, take frames out, reverse the order to play it backward, add Back and forth, change the size or add other images, and make a new GIF.

The tool tells you how many frames it added from each file. A very long animation adds only its first frames, up to 100 in the list, and the message says how many it has in all. In a browser that cannot read the frames, an animated GIF or WebP counts as one image, its first picture, and the tool says so.

Transparent GIFs

A GIF pixel is either fully see-through or not at all: one palette entry can be marked as transparent, and nothing in between (MDN). Choose Transparent as the background to keep the see-through parts of PNG or WebP images, and to leave the space around images of other shapes clear.

Soft edges, such as a drop shadow or the smooth edge of a cut-out, become hard edges, because each pixel is decided as see-through or solid. If you know the color of the page the GIF will sit on, choose that color as the background instead: the edges then blend into it.

Colors and dithering

A GIF palette holds up to 256 colors. The tool builds one palette from all your images together, so the colors stay steady when the GIF moves from one frame to the next. Dithering spreads the small difference between each pixel and its nearest palette color to the pixels around it, which keeps photos and gradients smooth.

For screenshots, diagrams, logos and drawings with flat colors, turn dithering off and try 64 or 128 colors: the GIF gets smaller and the flat areas stay clean. For photos, keep 256 colors with dithering. These are the sizes we got with one second per frame:

Emoji, slideshows and where else a GIF fits

For Slack custom emoji, a GIF can have up to 50 frames, and square images under 128 KB with a transparent background work best (Slack Help Center): pick Square 1:1, 240 pixels and Transparent here. On GitHub, a GIF of up to 10 MB can go into an issue, a pull request or a comment (GitHub Docs), so a few screenshots in a loop can walk through a bug step by step.

Photo slideshows tend to be small: three photos at 480 pixels made a 333 KB GIF in our tests, far under the 20 MiB per file Discord allows by default (Discord developer documentation). A GIF plays by itself in a web page, with no play button, but not every app plays it the way a browser does: neither WhatsApp nor Instagram says on a help page we could find how it treats a GIF from your gallery, so send yourself a test before you share it widely.

For a GIF from a clip you filmed, use Video to GIF instead: it reads the frames straight from the video.

Free, private and without a watermark

Everything happens inside this page. Your browser opens the images, draws each frame and packs the GIF in a background task of this page, without sending anything anywhere. The first time you make a GIF, your browser downloads the small GIF encoder from uncrop.si.

Nothing is added to your GIF: no watermark, no logo and no link. There is no account and no cap on how many GIFs you make. The GIF holds only pixels and timing, so no location, date or camera details from your photos go into it. Under the download you can see how many requests this page sent while you used it.