Video to GIF

Drop the MP4 onto the page, drag the two trim handles to the section you want, and press Create. The defaults — 15 fps at 480 px wide — suit most screen recordings. The result appears on the right, looping exactly as the saved file will, with its size next to it.

No. The engine is FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly and it runs inside your browser tab. The file is read from disk into the tab's memory and the result is written back out as a download. Nothing about the file crosses the network, which you can confirm by watching the network panel while a render runs.

GIF compresses each frame separately and cannot throw away colour the way a video codec does, so size follows frame count and frame area almost linearly. In order of effect: shorten the clip, lower the frame rate, reduce the width, then cut the palette to 64 colours. Halving the width quarters the pixels and usually does more than any palette change.

12–15 fps and 480 px wide is a good starting point for a screen recording, and 640 px for something going into a README. Push to 20–24 fps only for fast motion such as a cursor flick or a scroll, and drop to 8–10 fps for a slow interface walkthrough where the file size matters more than smoothness.

Animated WebP is often much smaller than the same GIF and has better colour and transparency capabilities, although the final size depends on the clip and settings. Choose WebP for a modern browser destination. Choose GIF when a destination accepts only GIF, the platform is old or unknown, or email animation is uncertain; make its first frame meaningful either way.

GIF allows 256 colours per frame, so a gradient or a photograph has to be approximated. This tool builds a palette from your specific clip rather than using a generic one, which removes most of the problem. If banding remains, raise the palette back to 256 colours and switch dithering to Floyd–Steinberg; if it looks speckled instead, you likely want no dithering at all, which is common for flat interface captures.

There is no fixed limit, but the tool warns past 30 seconds because GIF size grows with every frame. Beyond about 450 frames — say 30 seconds at 15 fps — you are usually better off with WebP, or with a real video file. Reverse and boomerang are the tightest constraint of all, since they hold every frame in memory before writing anything.

The conversion engine is roughly 31 MB and is downloaded the first time you choose a file. It is cached with a long expiry afterwards, so later visits and later renders start immediately. The download is deliberately deferred until you actually pick a file, so simply reading this page costs you nothing.

Not here. This tool trims in time, not in space, and it adds nothing to the picture. Cropping and captioning are editing decisions that need their own preview and undo, and bolting a weak version of both onto a converter tends to produce a tool that does neither well.

Short clips usually work. Long ones often do not — mobile browsers allocate a tab far less memory than desktop ones, and the tab is killed when that runs out. Reverse and boomerang are the first things to fail. For anything beyond a few seconds, a desktop browser is the safer choice.