Turning a short video clip into an animated GIF

A GIF plays anywhere a video will not: inside a bug report, a chat that strips attachments, a README, a slide. This walks through choosing the part of a recording that matters, the one rule about length that surprises everybody, the two settings that decide what the file weighs, and how to burn a line of text into every frame.

Turn a video clip into a GIF →

The clip never leaves your device

Drop a recording on the clip page and nothing is sent anywhere. The file is read, decoded and re-encoded by your own browser, and the only thing that reaches our servers is the finished animation. That is unusual here — most of the tools on this site do their work at the far end — and it is worth knowing, because a phone recording is often tens of megabytes and none of them travel.

It also means your browser has to be able to open the recording, which is not quite the same as your phone being able to play it. There is a note at the foot of this page about what to do when that goes wrong.

You can point the page at a web address instead of choosing a file. That one does pass through our servers, because a browser is not allowed to reach across to somebody else's site and read the bytes back; we fetch it and hand it straight to your browser without storing it.

You get 10 seconds of animation, however long the clip is

Choosing a recording opens a filmstrip with a handle at each end — the same shape every phone uses for trimming. Drag either handle and the selection narrows. Nothing is thrown away until you throw it away, which is a change from how the page used to behave: it took the opening moments and told you so afterwards.

Here is the part worth reading twice. The limit is on the animation, not on the selection. What costs bytes is how many frames end up in the file, not how much of the recording they were sampled from — 100 frames weighs about the same whether they span 5 seconds or 60. So a wide selection is not refused and not cut short. It is sampled evenly across the whole span and played at the rate you chose, which comes out as a speed-up.

A 13-second selection becomes a 10-second animation running about 1.3 times faster. A minute becomes the same 10 seconds at roughly 6 times. The line under the filmstrip says which before you convert anything, and the page says it again afterwards, because by then the recording has left the screen and you would have no way to tell.

That behaviour is useful far more often than it sounds. Time-lapses, long pans and anything where the interesting thing is the change rather than the pace all read better sped up.

Frames a second and width are the whole size story

Two settings decide what you end up with. Frames a second is how smooth it looks; width is how big the picture is. Every other lever you might expect — quality, output format, the shape presets — is either absent or would defeat the point, so the page does not offer them.

Reach for frames a second first. Going from 12 to 8 removes a third of the frames and a third of the weight, and on most subjects nobody notices. Halving the width removes rather more than half, because you are dropping both dimensions at once, but it is also the change people see.

The widest this page will make is 640 pixels, and the cap exists because of what the format weighs rather than what a browser can manage. A 10-second animation at 1024 pixels runs to about 31 megabytes, which is no use to anybody trying to attach it to something.

Your browser deliberately encodes wider than the size you asked for, and the version handed back to you is smaller again — usually around half. Our image service re-encodes the animation with a better encoder than a browser has, and it will only do that when the width it is asked for is below the width it was given.

Words burnt into every frame

Once the animation is on the stage you will see two dashed rectangles on it, each offering to hold some text. Type into either and the words appear on the picture straight away, wrapped and shrunk to fit whatever space the rectangle covers.

Both rectangles can be moved and resized. Drag from the middle to reposition, pull a corner to change the shape, and the words re-flow as you go rather than waiting for you to let go. Each area keeps its own colour and its own size, which matters more than it sounds: a caption over a bright sky and a caption over a dark foreground cannot both be white.

Tap or click either rectangle and the cursor lands in the matching field below, so on a phone you are not hunting for which box feeds which area.

Nothing is baked into the file while you are typing — what you see is drawn over the top. The words go into the frames themselves when you save, which is why saving takes a moment longer than you might expect for a file that is already sitting there.

Worth knowing

If your phone's recording will not open

Modern phones record in a codec called HEVC, and a good many desktop browsers cannot decode it even though the phone that shot it plays it perfectly. The failure is a quiet one: the sound track opens, so the file appears to have a length, while the picture never arrives at all.

The page recognises that shape and says so, and it blames the browser rather than the file, because the file is fine. Converting on the phone itself usually works. Failing that, anything that re-saves the recording as H.264 will make it readable.

Turn a video clip into a GIF →