MP4 to GIF Converter

Turn a few seconds of an MP4, a MOV from an iPhone or Mac, or a WebM or MKV recording into an animated GIF. Trim it, size it and check the file size before you download. Nothing is uploaded.

Drop videos hereorChoose videoMP4, MOV, WebM or MKV · Videos are not uploaded

Download all (ZIP)

🔒 Your videos are turned into GIFs on your own device. They are never uploaded to any server. Your settings are remembered in this browser.

How to convert a video to GIF

1. Drop a video into the box above, or tap Choose video. MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV all work, and you can add several — each one gets its own row in the list.
2. Type a Start and End time, or pause the preview where you want and tap Use current position. Then pick a width and a frame rate; the line under the options shows the frame count, pixel size and estimated file size as you change them.
3. Tap Make GIF. When the animated preview appears, tap Download GIF. Once two or more GIFs are done, Download all (ZIP) saves them in one go.

What happens to your video

Frames are taken at even steps from your start time — at 12 fps, one every twelfth of a second — and each is scaled to the width you chose. The height follows the shape of the video, and nothing is ever enlarged: a video narrower than your setting keeps its own width. Clips shot upright on a phone stay upright, and very tall frames are limited to 1280 pixels high.

A GIF can hold at most 256 colours, so the tool looks at eight frames spread across your clip and builds one palette that every frame shares. That keeps colours steady instead of shifting from frame to frame. The sound is left out, because GIF has no audio track, and the file keeps the video's name: IMG_0001.MOV becomes IMG_0001.gif.

Which videos open depends on what your browser can decode. H.264, the format inside most MP4 files, works almost everywhere; VP8, VP9 and AV1 work in most current browsers; HEVC (H.265), which iPhones use, depends on the device. When the browser's fast decoder (WebCodecs) can't be used, the tool captures frames through the browser's own video player instead — slower, but the GIF comes out the same.

Settings that decide how big the GIF is

Every frame of a GIF is stored as a complete picture, so the file grows with three things you control: the width (the height follows), the frame rate and the length of the clip. Halving the width leaves a quarter of the pixels; going from 15 to 10 fps drops a third of the frames. The table gives sensible starting points — suggestions, not rules set by any platform:

The width buttons are 320, 480, 640 and 800 pixels; type any width from 32 to 1280 into Custom for sizes such as 240 or 1200. The line under the options re-estimates the size whenever you change something, and a red note appears when the GIF is likely to pass 15 MB.

Why a GIF is bigger than the video it came from

A GIF several times larger than the MP4 it came from is normal. Video formats such as H.264 store a complete picture only now and then and describe most frames as changes from their neighbours. GIF, a format from the late 1980s, has nothing like that: every frame is a separate image of up to 256 colours, packed with lossless LZW compression. Some encoders trim each frame to the rectangle that changed; this one keeps every frame whole, which makes the result predictable rather than as small as possible.

Google's web.dev guide on replacing animated GIFs with video gives an example: a 3.7 MB GIF, the same clip as a 551 KB MP4, and a 341 KB WebM.

What is in the picture matters as much as the settings. LZW saves space by spotting sequences of pixels it has already seen, so flat colour costs little and noise costs a lot:

• Compresses well: recordings of apps and websites, slides, cartoons, logos — large areas of exactly the same colour.
• Compresses badly: camera footage with noise or grain, leaves, water, confetti, handheld shake and smooth gradients, where neighbouring pixels rarely match.

When a camera clip comes out too big, a smaller width usually saves more than any other setting. Steady footage shot in good light helps as well, because it has less noise to encode.

256 colours, banding and the Dithering switch

A video frame can show millions of colours; a GIF frame can use at most 256. Squeeze a smooth gradient — sky, a sunset, skin in soft light, a blurred background — into that palette and it breaks into visible stripes, an effect called banding.

Dithering hides the stripes by mixing dots of nearby palette colours, much as printed photos mix dots of ink. With Dithering ticked, the tool uses Floyd–Steinberg error diffusion: whatever colour error a pixel ends up with is handed on to the pixels around it, and alternate rows are scanned in opposite directions so the pattern doesn't drift to one side. The price is visible grain and a bigger file, since dotted areas compress worse than flat ones; the size estimate takes this into account.

• Leave it off for screen recordings, interfaces, text, cartoons and logos. Their flat colours fit in 256 anyway, and dots would only make edges look fuzzy.
• Turn it on for camera footage with skies, faces, shadows or gradients, when stripes bother you more than a somewhat larger file.

Because the shared palette comes from eight sample frames, a colour that appears only briefly — a red logo that flashes up for half a second — may not get an entry of its own and is drawn with the nearest colour available.

Frame rate and timing

A GIF has no frame rate setting. Each frame carries its own delay, counted in hundredths of a second. At 10 fps that is exactly 10 hundredths, and at 20 fps exactly 5. Rates of 8, 12 and 15 fps don't divide evenly, so the tool alternates delays to keep the total right: 8, 9, 8 hundredths at 12 fps, 7, 6, 7 at 15 fps and 13, 12 at 8 fps.

The frame count is the clip length times the frame rate, rounded to whole frames, and the GIF lasts exactly that many frames. A 6-second clip at 12 fps is 72 frames and plays for 6.00 seconds; a 2.75-second clip at 10 fps becomes 28 frames and plays for 2.8 seconds.

More frames per second is not always smoother. Chrome, Firefox and Safari treat a frame delay of 10 milliseconds or less as 100 milliseconds (a comment in Chromium's source code explains it as a defence against ads that set zero delays to flash as fast as possible), so a GIF made at a very high frame rate can play slower than intended. The choices here stop at 20 fps, 50 milliseconds per frame, well clear of that. For most clips 10–15 fps looks smooth and keeps the size in check; use 20 for quick motion such as a fast swipe or a sports move.

How long can the clip be?

Two limits keep the work within what a browser tab can handle. Each GIF made here can have at most 600 frames — 75 seconds at 8 fps, 60 at 10, 50 at the default 12, 40 at 15 and 30 at 20 fps. At larger sizes a second limit applies: frames × width × height must stay under 100 million pixels. For a typical video, the longest clip at 12 fps works out like this:

Upright video reaches the pixel limit sooner because every frame is taller than it is wide, and its height is capped at 1280 pixels — that is why 800 turns into 720 × 1280. When a limit is reached, Make GIF is greyed out and the reason appears in red, so you know whether to shorten the clip or lower the width or frame rate. A GIF that runs for half a minute is usually better sent as a video anyway.

Turning a screen recording into a clean GIF

Screen recordings make the best GIFs: flat colours, sharp text and small files. Both main desktop systems can record the screen without extra software:

• Mac: press Shift-Command-5 and choose Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion. The recording is saved as a .mov file, on the desktop unless you change it.
• Windows 11: press Windows logo key + Shift + R, select the area and start recording in Snipping Tool. When you stop, save the recording and drop that file in here.

High-resolution screens record more pixels than you see. A Mac with a Retina display records at twice the size things appear, so a window that looks 700 pixels wide arrives 1,400 pixels wide. Set the GIF width to half the recording's width and the interface comes back at its real size — crisp, and with a quarter of the pixels. On Windows, divide by the display scale instead, for example by 1.5 at 150%.

A few habits make the GIF easier to follow: record just the window or area that matters, turn off notifications, move the pointer slowly and pause on each click. Leave a still moment at the start and end, then use Play clip to watch the part you picked and nudge Start and End until the last frame leads smoothly back into the first.

GIF, or just send the video?

Choose GIF when the place you're posting won't play video by itself: email, many chat apps and comment threads, issue trackers, wikis, README files and anything else that only accepts images. A GIF starts moving on its own, needs no player and has no sound to mute.

Choose video when you control the page or the person can simply press play. On your own site, web.dev recommends a muted, looping video — <video autoplay loop muted playsinline> — which looks just like a GIF at a fraction of the size. If the real problem is a video too big to send, shrink it with the video compressor instead; if you only need the soundtrack, MP4 to MP3 saves the audio on its own.

Email deserves a warning. According to Microsoft's support pages, Outlook for Windows shows only the first frame of an animated GIF when animations are switched off — through the Play animated GIFs option in older versions, or Windows' own animation setting in newer ones. Put the key message or product in the first frame so the GIF still works as a still picture.

For work that isn't public yet

A product demo before launch, a client's design under NDA, a screen recording with customer data in it: the video is decoded and the GIF encoded inside your browser tab, so the file itself never leaves your device. The page does fetch a small video engine from capypix.com the first time you use it, and the site's analytics record how many files were added and whether something was downloaded — never file names, clip lengths or content. The privacy policy has the details.

Frequently asked questions

Or caption a popular meme

Browse more: Popular Memes · Reaction Memes · Cat Memes · Dog Memes · Funny Animal Memes · Funny Work Memes · School Memes · Anime Memes