Video to GIF, made on your device

What makes a GIF big or small

A GIF stores every frame as a picture, so its size grows with the pixels in a frame and the number of frames. The tool shows both as you change the settings, and estimates the file size by packing a few real frames from your part of the video with the settings you chose. In our tests the estimate came within 5% of the finished GIF for a camera pan. For screen recordings it came out high, because it cannot know in advance how many frames will show nothing new.

These are the sizes we got from 5 seconds of two test videos: a slow camera pan across a landscape photo, with grain like a phone camera adds, and a screen recording where one box moves for 4 seconds and then everything stays still. Each GIF took between 1.5 and 4.5 seconds to make in Chrome or Edge on our test laptop.

Parts of the picture that do not move cost almost nothing: the tool leaves those pixels out of each new frame, so the frame before shows through, and a frame with nothing new is folded into the one before it with its time added. That is why the screen recording above is over 100 times smaller than the camera pan. A clip filmed on a tripod or a phone held still makes a smaller GIF than a moving camera.

High quality GIFs, and what a GIF cannot keep

No GIF is an exact copy of a video. Each pixel points into a palette of at most 256 colors (MDN), where a video frame can hold millions, and the format carries no sound. So converting without losing quality really means losing as little as the format allows, and three settings decide how close you get.

Colors: for anything filmed, keep 256 colors with Smooth gradients (dithering) on. The tool builds one palette from frames spread across your whole part, so colors stay steady from frame to frame instead of flickering, and dithering mixes neighboring palette colors in a fine, fixed pattern so skies and skin do not break into bands. Because the pattern stays put, still parts of the picture stay identical between frames. For screen recordings, drawings and other flat colors, turn it off.

Size: pick the width the GIF will be shown at, not the largest one. A GIF shown smaller than it is wastes bytes, and one stretched larger looks soft. The largest size here is 1080 pixels on the longer side and never more than the video itself, so a 16:9 4K video gives a GIF of up to 1080 x 608 pixels.

Timing: frames keep their place to a hundredth of a second, the unit the GIF format stores (GIF89a specification). At 12 frames per second each frame should last 8.33 hundredths, so the tool gives frames 8 or 9 hundredths in turn and the whole GIF keeps the length of the part you chose.

Frame rate, speed and how it plays

The frame rate is how many pictures per second the GIF shows. 10 to 15 frames per second looks smooth for most clips; 20 to 30 suits fast movement, at a larger size. To keep every frame, choose the video's own rate: a 30 fps phone clip made at 30 fps loses colors but no frames. The tool never offers more frames per second than the video has, because those frames would only repeat.

Speed changes how much of the video goes into each second of the GIF. At 2 times faster, 10 seconds of video become a 5-second GIF with the same number of frames per second, so it has as many frames as a 5-second part played normally. Half speed makes slow motion. Press Preview this part to watch the part at the speed you chose before you make the GIF.

Forever is what most people expect from a GIF. Once plays to the end and stops on the last frame. Back and forth plays the part forward and then backward, so a part with no clean loop point still plays without a jump. To play a GIF backward only, make it here and then open it in the GIF maker, which can reverse its frames in browsers that can read them, such as Chrome and Edge.

On an iPhone or an Android phone

Video to GIF runs in the phone's browser, so there is no app to install and no account. On an iPhone, Safari works: tap Choose a video, then take the clip from your photo library or from Files. Safari saves the GIF to Downloads: tap the Downloads button next to the search field, or open Files, then iCloud Drive, then Downloads (Apple).

iPhone 7 and later can record video in HEVC, the High Efficiency format (Apple), and not every browser can decode it. When yours cannot, the tool says so before anything starts. Switching the camera to Most Compatible (Settings, then Camera, then Formats) records new videos in H.264 instead, the format of most of our test videos.

On Android, use Chrome or Samsung Internet; Firefox for Android cannot decode video for the tool yet. Chrome saves the GIF to the phone's download location, and Downloads in Chrome's menu or the Files app will find it (Google).

We tested in Chrome and Edge on a laptop, at computer and phone screen sizes. A phone has less memory than a laptop, so for a long part on an older phone, keep the size at 480 pixels or below.

Large video files and long GIFs

The size of the video file is not what limits you here. Your browser reads only the part you chose, a little at a time, from the file on your device, and nothing waits for an upload. In our test, an 80-second 1080p video of 246 MB opened in about half a second in Chrome and in Edge, and 5 seconds from its one-minute mark became a 5.3 MB GIF in about 2 seconds.

The limit is on the GIF: up to 600 frames, which is 60 seconds at 10 frames per second or 40 seconds at 15. Large sizes allow fewer frames, so the whole GIF stays within what a browser can hold in memory, and the tool tells you the longest part your settings allow. Back and forth keeps a copy of every frame while it works, so at large sizes it allows fewer frames. A 40-second GIF of 600 frames at 480 pixels took us 11 to 14 seconds to make.

While the GIF is made, keep the tab open. You can cancel at any time, and nothing is saved.

GIF size limits for Discord, email and GitHub

Discord's developer documentation gives 20 MiB per file as the default upload limit for all users, and more with Nitro or on a boosted server (Discord). That is 20,971,520 bytes, about 21 MB in the units this page uses, and the real size of your GIF shows next to its estimate once it is made. A personal Gmail account can attach up to 25 MB; past that, Gmail swaps the file for a Google Drive link (Google). GitHub takes GIFs of up to 10 MB in issues, pull requests and comments, handy for showing a bug or a new feature in motion (GitHub Docs).

We found no official WhatsApp or Instagram help page that says how a GIF file sent from your phone is handled, so we quote no number for them: send it to yourself first and see how it arrives. For a Reel, a Story or a WhatsApp Status with sound, cut the clip as a video instead, because a GIF has no sound and is usually larger than the same seconds of video.

When a GIF comes out too large, the quickest fixes are, in order: a shorter part, a smaller size, a lower frame rate, then fewer colors. In the table above, going from 480 to 320 pixels saved more than dropping to 8 frames per second or to 64 colors.

What happens to your video

Everything happens inside this page. Your browser reads the frames of your part of the video from your device, scales them, and packs them into the GIF in a background task of this page, without sending the video anywhere. The first time you choose a video, your browser downloads the video reader and the GIF encoder from uncrop.si.

We add no watermark, logo or text to the GIF, and there is no account or paid version. A GIF holds only pixels and timing, so nothing from the video's metadata, such as the place a phone recorded it, the date or the device, goes into it. Under the download you can see how many requests this page sent while you used it.

Which browsers can do it

Reading the frames uses WebCodecs, the part of the browser that decodes video. Chrome and Edge have it from version 94, Firefox on computers from version 130 and Samsung Internet from version 17. Safari has had part of it since version 16.4 and all of it since version 26 (caniuse); the part Safari 26 added is sound (WebKit), which a GIF does not need. Firefox for Android does not have it. We tested in Chrome and Edge.

Whether a browser can decode HEVC depends on the browser and the device. In our tests on the same Windows laptop, Chrome made GIFs from iPhone HEVC videos and Edge could not decode them. When your browser cannot read a video's frames, the tool says so before anything starts, and the cut and MP3 tools still work with the file, because they do not decode the picture.