From a video, a handful of photos or a screen recording — on a phone or a computer. Five decisions make the difference between a crisp 800 KB loop and a blurry 12 MB one.
Make a GIF from a video
Open the video to GIF converter and choose your clip (MP4, MOV or WebM). On a phone, it opens your camera roll.
Drag Start and End to the moment you want. Aim for 2–6 seconds.
Pick a frame rate: 10–12 fps for most things, 15 for fast motion.
Optional: crop to square, add a caption, pick a filter.
Choose a size preset (for example Discord or X), then tap Make GIF and download.
Make a GIF from photos
Select several pictures in the images to GIF maker. They’re sorted by file name, so numbered exports from Procreate, Aseprite or a camera burst land in the right order. Set the time per image — 0.5–1 s for a slideshow, 80–150 ms for stop-motion — and reorder frames on the film strip. A single photo can move too: pick a zoom, pan or float motion.
The five decisions that decide quality and size
Decision
Good default
Why
Length
2–6 s
Every frame is a full picture; size grows linearly with length.
Frame rate
10–12 fps
Smooth enough for most motion; 25 fps is double the frames of 12.
Width
480 px
Phones display GIFs at about 300–400 CSS px. Size scales with width².
Colours
128
Rarely distinguishable from 256 except in skies and skin.
Dithering
Off
Hides banding but adds noise, which makes files larger.
Explainer: why GIFs band — the 256-colour palette
Every GIF frame can use at most 256 colours, picked from 16.7 million. The encoder has to choose which ones and snap every pixel to its nearest pick. Drag the slider and watch a gradient sky fall apart into stripes, then switch on dithering to see how scattered pixels fake the missing shades — at a cost in file size.
Original (full colour)As a GIF: 16 colours
… for this one frame
What to take away: 64–128 colours is usually indistinguishable for cartoons, UI and screen recordings. Photos with skies or skin need 256 and sometimes dithering. Dithering adds pixel noise, which LZW compression hates, so the file grows.
Explainer: how GIF frame timing really works
A GIF has no frame rate. Each frame carries its own delay, stored as a whole number of hundredths of a second. That has two surprising effects: only some frame rates are exact, and delays that are too short get slowed down by browsers.
Stored delay3 / 100 s
Exact rate stored33.33 fps
What browsers play33.33 fps
Rates that divide 100 evenly — 50, 25, 20, 12.5, 10 — play exactly. 30 fps becomes 3/100 s, which is really 33.3 fps; 15 fps becomes 7/100 s (14.3 fps). Over a 3-second loop these drifts are invisible, but they explain why a converted clip can end a little early or late.
Sharing your GIF
Each platform has its own ceiling: Discord emoji must be under 256 KB, Slack emoji under 128 KB, X accepts up to 15 MB on the web, and Instagram doesn’t take GIF uploads at all — send it an MP4. The GIF size limits table lists them all, and the presets in the editor apply them for you. When a file is still too big, the GIF compressor fits it to an exact target.
A GIF that must play on a website is often better as animated WebP or a muted, looping MP4: same look, a fraction of the bytes. The GIF to MP4 and GIF to WebP converters handle that.
Questions
What is the best frame rate for a GIF?
10–15 fps for most clips; 8–10 for screen recordings; 20–25 only for fast action. Rates that divide 100 evenly (10, 20, 25) play back exactly.
What size should a GIF be?
480 px wide suits chat and social on phones. Emoji are 128×128. For email keep it under 600 px wide and about 1 MB.
How do I make a GIF on iPhone?
Open GifCraft in Safari, tap Choose a file, pick a video from Photos, trim it and tap Make GIF. Then tap Share → Save Image to put it in Photos.
How long can a GIF be?
The format has no limit, but platforms do (see the size limits page). In practice 2–6 seconds keeps files small enough to share.
Is it “gif” or “jif”?
Its creator, Steve Wilhite of CompuServe, said “jif”. Most people say “gif” with a hard g. Both are understood.