GIF Maker

How to make a GIF

What makes a GIF big: we measured it

We turned the same 5 second clip, NASA's public domain video of astronauts suiting up for a spacewalk, into GIFs with this tool at different settings, and saved the same clip as an animated WebP and an MP4 for comparison. Every GIF below uses 256 colours with dithering at 10 frames per second unless a row says otherwise.

Width is the biggest lever. The GIF grows with the area of the picture, so going from 480 to 320 pixels wide cut it from 1.90 MB to 919 KB. WebP and MP4 use far more modern compression and stayed smaller at every width; at 480 pixels the GIF was 2.3 times the WebP and 7.4 times the MP4.

The frame count is the second lever. A GIF stores every frame, so more frames per second means a bigger file almost in proportion. An MP4 barely noticed the change: going from 10 to 24 frames per second added only 24 percent to it, while the GIF grew by 70 percent.

Fewer colours save less than people expect, 13 to 17 percent each time you halve them, and turning dithering off saved another 3 to 4 percent. Use them to trim a file that is just over a limit; use width and frame rate to make big savings.

Why this GIF maker makes smaller files

The simplest way to write a GIF stores every frame in full. Our encoder compares each frame with what is already on screen, stores only the rectangle that changed, and marks unchanged pixels inside it as see-through, so the previous frame shows through. On the test clip that cut the GIF from 5.14 MB to 1.90 MB, 63 percent smaller, and it came out 36 percent smaller than the same clip made with ffmpeg's optimised GIF settings (2.97 MB).

The saving depends on the footage. A screen recording, a still camera or a person talking in front of a plain wall gains the most, because most of each frame never changes. Handheld video, panning shots and photo slideshows with fades change every pixel, so they gain little.

Settings that matter

Time per frame

For a slideshow of photos, half a second to a second per frame gives people time to see each picture. For video, the frame time comes from the frame rate you pick: 10 frames per second means 0.1 seconds each. Browsers treat anything faster than 0.02 seconds as 0.1 seconds, so this tool never goes below 0.02.

Fit or fill

Photos rarely share one shape. Fit whole frame keeps every photo complete and fills the gaps with a background colour; Fill and crop fills the frame and trims the edges instead. Shape sets the frame itself: like the first frame, square, 4:5 portrait or 16:9 wide.

Fades and boomerang

A fade blends each frame into the next over a few in-between frames, which makes a slideshow feel finished. Boomerang plays the frames forward and then backward, so a short clip loops without a visible jump. Both add frames, and every frame adds to the file size.

Colours and dithering

Every GIF frame can use at most 256 colours. The tool picks the best 256 for each frame separately, which keeps photos looking natural. Dithering mixes those colours into fine patterns so gradients like skies stay smooth. Switch it off for flat graphics, logos or screenshots, where it only adds noise.

Making a GIF from a video

Pick the shortest moment that tells the story, often 2 to 4 seconds. Start at 10 frames per second and 480 pixels wide; our 5 second test clip came out at 1.90 MB with those settings. MP4 files with H.264 video open in every current browser. iPhones record in a High Efficiency format (HEVC) by default, which Safari opens but other browsers may not; choosing Most Compatible in the camera settings, or converting the clip to an H.264 MP4 first, fixes that.

Frequently asked questions

Other tools you might need

Test method: 5 seconds from 0:14 of NASA's "Suiting Up for a Spacewalk" (Johnson Space Center, 2019), scaled with Lanczos, encoded with this page's own GIF encoder in Node.js, animated WebP with libwebp at quality 75 and MP4 with x264 at CRF 23, all through ffmpeg 6.1. See the full write-up for sources.