Turn a video into a GIF

Almost nothing is filmed at a rate meant for GIFs. Even a smooth-looking GIF is usually 8–15 frames a second, well under the 24–60 a normal video runs at, and the difference between the source rate and what you actually need is pure savings — frames this tool never has to decode, quantize or write. Dropping from 15fps to 8fps roughly halves the file for most clips with little visible loss of motion. It is worth trying before touching anything else.

A GIF can share one colour table across every frame, or let each frame carry its own. Sharing is smaller, but a table built to cover a whole clip does worse by any single frame than one built just for it — visible as banding and colour drift the moment the picture changes. This tool quantizes every frame on its own. It costs a few more bytes than sharing would and buys back the accuracy a shared table would have spent them hiding.

Before the download is offered, the page reads its own output back: the GIF signature, the width and height recorded in the file's own header, and whether this browser's own image decoder will open it at all. A tool that writes a file and simply says "done" without looking at what it wrote is trusting the encoder more than the evidence.

Decoding, colour quantizing and GIF encoding all happen in this page. There is no server here to send the video to, and the page's security policy blocks any connection to anywhere but this site. Here is how that is enforced.