Video to GIF
Turn a clip into a GIF you can paste anywhere.
Drop a video here
Or choose a file. It is played and read on your device — nothing is uploaded, and there is no queue to wait in.
Reading the clip on your device…
That didn't work.
Your video is read and converted on your device, never uploaded.
Keyboard shortcuts
- / or ⌘K
- Search every tool
- ⌘↵
- Run this tool, from anywhere on the page
- ⌘S
- Download the result
- ?
- Open and close this list
About the Pathine Video to GIF
Turns a few seconds of video into a GIF that plays by itself wherever you paste it — a pull request, a support ticket, a message thread, a slide. Drop a clip in, drag the two handles to the part worth keeping, and the GIF appears beside it. Nothing to install, and no watermark.
The clip is decoded by the browser you are already using, so the formats that work are the ones your browser plays: MP4 almost everywhere, MOV from an iPhone in Safari, and WebM from a screen recorder. There is no upload and no queue, which also means a long clip takes real time to read — the frame counter tells you where it has got to.
A GIF has no sound and no more than 256 colours in it, and both of those are the format rather than this tool. What is worth knowing is that the second one is why the width and the frame rate matter so much: a GIF is a stack of whole pictures, so doubling the width is roughly four times the file, and every extra second is another pile of frames. Ten seconds at 480 pixels is usually the sensible ceiling.
When you'd reach for it
Showing a bug in a pull request
GitHub plays a GIF inline and makes a video an attachment somebody has to click. Six seconds of the thing going wrong, playing on a loop under the description, is the difference between a reproduction and a paragraph about one.
Sending a screen recording that plays in the message
Slack, email and most ticket systems will autoplay a GIF and will not autoplay an MP4. Turning the recording into one is how the person reading sees it without opening anything.
Pulling one moment out of a long clip
The trim handles seek the video as you drag them, so you pick the four seconds you meant against the picture rather than by guessing at timestamps and re-exporting.
Putting a moving example on a slide or a page
A GIF needs no player, no controls and no hosting — it is an image, so anywhere an image goes, it goes, including places that strip video entirely.
How to turn a video into a GIF
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Add your video
Drop the file here or choose it. It opens on the first ten seconds, which is a sensible length for a GIF rather than a limit — drag the end handle further if you need more.
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Trim to the part that matters
Drag the start and end handles. The video jumps to whichever one you moved, so you can see exactly where the GIF will begin and end.
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Choose a width and a frame rate
480 pixels and 10 frames a second suits most screen recordings. Drop to 320 or to 5 frames if the file needs to be smaller; raise them if the movement is fast and the result looks choppy.
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Download
The size, the dimensions and the number of frames are shown beside the button, and the GIF above it is the actual file playing — not a preview of one.
Common questions
Is my video uploaded anywhere?
No. It is played and read inside this browser tab, and the GIF is assembled on your device. Nothing is sent, there is no queue, and there is nothing on a server to delete afterwards. That matters more here than for most conversions, because the clip is often a recording of somebody's own screen.
Why is my GIF so much bigger than the video?
Because a GIF barely compresses across time. An MP4 stores what changed between frames; a GIF stores frames, and only gets to skip the parts of the picture that did not move at all. A ten second clip can easily come out larger than the video it came from. Narrower, shorter and fewer frames a second are the three ways down, in that order of effect.
Where did the sound go?
A GIF cannot carry audio — there is nowhere in the format to put it. If the sound is the point, a video file is the right answer and no GIF will do.
Why do the colours look flatter than the video?
A GIF holds at most 256 colours, so a palette is chosen to describe your whole clip and every frame is redrawn in it. Screen recordings usually come through unchanged because they have few colours to begin with. Footage of a sky or a face has thousands, and those get a small amount of deliberate speckling to hide the banding a hard reduction would show.
What video formats can it open?
Whatever your browser plays, which is not the same list in every browser: MP4 works nearly everywhere, MOV from an iPhone opens in Safari and often not in Chrome, and WebM opens in Chrome and Firefox. If a file is refused, the browser could not decode it — converting it to MP4 first is the fix.
How long can the clip be?
There is no fixed limit, but the frames have to be held in memory at once to choose the palette, so a long clip at a large width is sampled at a lower frame rate and the page tells you when that happens. In practice anything past about thirty seconds is a video rather than a GIF.
Can I make it play once instead of looping?
Yes — the Repeat control switches between looping forever and playing through once. Looping is the default because it is what a GIF is normally for, and because a one-shot GIF that somebody scrolls past has already finished.