HEIC to JPG: Quality, Metadata, and Privacy
A careful HEIC-to-JPG workflow preserves the picture you need without accidentally sharing location data or repeatedly degrading the image.
Read guide →Video to GIF
Turn a clip into an animated GIF using a palette generated from your own footage, with adjustable frame rate and width.
Drop a video here or click to browse
MP4, WebM, MOV, AVI — processed locally and never uploaded.
Reviewed 2026-08-15
Free Video to GIF – how it works
GIF only supports 256 colours per frame, so the quality of a converted clip depends almost entirely on which 256 colours you get. This tool runs FFmpeg's palettegen and paletteuse filters, which analyse your specific footage and build a palette from it instead of falling back to a generic web palette. The difference on skin tones and gradients is large.
Scaling uses the Lanczos filter, which keeps edges and text noticeably sharper than the default bilinear resize. Width is yours to set up to 1280 pixels and height follows automatically to preserve the aspect ratio.
Frame rate and duration are the two settings that drive file size hardest. A GIF has no interframe compression worth the name, so ten seconds at 24 fps is roughly two and a half times the data of ten seconds at 10 fps. Duration is capped at 30 seconds for that reason.
How to use Video to GIF online
- Add the video and pick the segment. Drop in your clip, then set a start time and a duration of up to 30 seconds. Choosing a tight segment is the single most effective way to keep the GIF small.
- Set frame rate and width. Ten frames per second suits screen recordings and reads as smooth enough for most motion. Fifteen is a reasonable middle. Twenty-four looks best on fast movement and costs the most. Width defaults to 480 pixels, which is usually plenty for a README or a chat message.
- Generate and check the size. Run the conversion and look at the output size. If it is too big, cut the duration first, then the frame rate, then the width.
When to use it
- Show a bug reproduction in a GitHub issue where video will not autoplay inline.
- Add a short interaction demo to a README or changelog entry.
- Make a looping reaction clip for a chat that blocks video attachments.
- Turn a product interaction into an image that renders in an email client.
Known limitations
- GIF is limited to 256 colours per frame. Footage with heavy gradients or film grain will show banding no matter how good the palette is.
- File sizes grow fast. A few seconds at a high frame rate and full width can easily exceed several megabytes, which is often larger than the source video.
- Duration is capped at 30 seconds because palette generation and GIF encoding both hold every frame in browser memory.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my GIF larger than the original video?
That is normal and expected. Modern video codecs compress across frames, while GIF stores each frame almost independently with a 256 colour palette. For anything more than a few seconds, video is dramatically more efficient.
How do I make the GIF smaller?
Shorten the duration first, since size scales almost linearly with it. Then drop the frame rate to 10 fps. Reducing the width helps too, because it cuts pixels per frame quadratically.
Why do the colours look better here than other converters?
The palette is generated from your clip rather than reused from a fixed table. FFmpeg scans the selected frames, picks 256 colours that suit that specific footage, then maps the frames onto it.
Is my video uploaded to a server?
No. FFmpeg is compiled to WebAssembly and runs inside the page, so the file is read from your disk into the tab's own memory. Nothing about the video is sent to opentools.
Why does the first render take longer?
The FFmpeg WebAssembly build is about 31 MB and has to download before the first job can start. The browser caches it afterwards, so later visits skip that step and begin encoding almost immediately.
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