How to make a GIF from a video

A GIF is a stack of pictures, each with at most 256 colours, and no sound. It plays almost everywhere and loops by itself, but it stores motion very wastefully: a few seconds of GIF can be bigger than a minute of MP4. So making a good GIF is mostly choosing what to leave out.

1. Pick a short moment

1. Open Video to GIF and choose the video: an MP4, an iPhone MOV, a WebM or an MKV. It is read on your device, so a large video opens as quickly as a small one, and nothing is uploaded.
2. Move the start and end to the part you want. Two to six seconds is enough for a reaction or a short demo; a GIF can hold up to 30.

2. Choose the width

The file grows with width times height, so halving the width makes the GIF about a quarter of the size. Around 320 to 480 pixels wide suits chats and comments, and the tool starts at about 480 pixels on the longer side. Screen recordings in documentation or a blog may need 800 or more to keep text readable.

3. Choose the frame rate

10 frames per second is enough for screen recordings. The default of 15 suits most clips; 20 to 30 makes fast motion smoother and the file bigger. Frames where nothing moves are dropped either way, so a still scene costs little.

4. Fit the size limit where it's going

Chat apps, forums and sites cap uploads, often somewhere between 2 MB and 25 MB, and stickers or emoji far less; the limit is usually in their help pages. Pick the nearest size limit in the tool, like under 10 MB or under 2 MB, and a GIF that comes out bigger is made again narrower until it fits. If it gets too small to see, make the clip shorter or lower the frame rate instead.

For screen recordings and cartoons, turn off "Smooth gradients": flat colours stay crisp and the file gets smaller. Leave it on for camera footage, where it stops skies and skin from breaking into bands.

When a video is better than a GIF

• If the place you're posting to plays videos, a short MP4 is much smaller and sharper than the same GIF, and it can keep its sound. Many social sites turn uploaded GIFs into videos anyway. Cut the moment out with the video trimmer, which keeps the original quality.
• To turn a GIF you already have into an MP4, use the MP4 converter.

Videos with a see-through background can't be made into GIFs here yet, and HDR videos, which recent iPhones record by default, come out in standard colours and can look flatter than on the phone.