How to make a GIF from photos or a video clip

You make a GIF in one of two ways: stitch a series of still images into a flipbook, or cut a few seconds out of a video and convert those frames. Either way the recipe for a GIF people can actually send is the same: a small width, a short running time and a modest frame rate. I built the GIF maker for the first route and the video to GIF tool for the second, and both run entirely in your browser.

Two ways to make a GIF

An animated GIF is a sequence of frames stored in one file, each with its own display time and a palette of at most 256 colours. That structure suits two kinds of source. Stills work for anything you would draw or photograph a frame at a time: a stop-motion sequence, product shots from several angles, a before and after that alternates, a hand-drawn animation. Video works for real motion: a reaction, a sports moment, a screen recording of a feature. The choice decides which tool to start with, not how the file is built.

From still images

In the GIF maker you choose your images, or drop them on the page, and they become frames in the order you picked them. Click a thumbnail to remove a frame. Every frame is sized to match the first image; if later images have a different shape they are letterboxed on white rather than stretched. You then pick:

• Delay per frame, from 50 ms to 2 seconds, applied to every frame. The default of 500 ms gives a calm two frames a second, good for slideshows and before and afters.
• Maximum width: 320, 480 or 640 pixels. Height follows the first image's proportions.

The result loops forever. For a stop-motion sequence, shoot with the camera fixed on a tripod or a pile of books and change one small thing between shots; consistent framing matters more than the number of frames.

From a video clip

The video to GIF tool lets you choose a start point and a length of up to 10 seconds, then a frame rate of 5, 10 or 15 frames per second and an output width. It grabs frames from the decoded video on your device and encodes them one by one. The defaults, 320 pixels at 10 fps, are deliberate: a two- to four-second clip at those settings usually lands at a size messaging apps accept without complaint. If your clip is longer than the moment you want, trim it first with the video trimmer; every second you remove saves more than any setting.

Keeping the file small

GIF compresses each frame on its own with LZW, a lossless method that works well on flat areas of colour and badly on photographic detail and noise. It has none of the motion-based compression that makes modern video small, so size grows roughly with width times height times number of frames. Three levers matter most:

• Width. Going from 640 to 320 pixels wide cuts the pixel count per frame to a quarter.
• Frame count. Halving the frame rate or the length halves the frames.
• Content. Graphics, screen recordings and cartoons with flat colour compress far better than grainy phone footage or gradients, which also posterise visibly when reduced to 256 colours.

Why GIFs are so big, and when a muted video is the better choice goes deeper into why a few seconds can weigh several megabytes.

Choosing the speed

Each GIF frame stores its delay in hundredths of a second, so a 100 ms delay is ten frames a second and 500 ms is two. Browsers do not honour delays shorter than 20 ms; delays of 0 or 10 ms are shown at about 100 ms, so a GIF built too fast plays slowly. If the result feels wrong after you have made it, you don't need to start again: the GIF speed changer rewrites only the timing, and GIF info shows the delay of every frame. How GIF frame timing works: delays, speed and loop counts explains the timing rules in detail.

When a GIF is the wrong format

GIFs are perfect for short, silent loops that must play everywhere, including email and old chat apps. They are a poor fit for anything longer than about ten seconds, anything with fine colour gradients, or anything needing sound. Many social platforms convert uploaded GIFs into video anyway. For those cases a muted MP4 is smaller and looks better; GIF to video converts an existing GIF. A GIF also supports only on-or-off transparency: each pixel is fully transparent or fully opaque, so soft edges and shadows look jagged against a different background. Nothing in either tool is uploaded or watermarked.