How to use it

Drag the handles on the film strip to set the start and end, or drag the middle of the selection to slide it along the video. The ← → keys move a handle by one frame, Shift+arrow by one second, and I and O set the start or end to the frame that is playing, as in an editing program. The Start and Length boxes under the strip take exact numbers. For a long recording a second, narrower strip appears above the first: it shows the whole video, and clicking it moves the selection there.

Then pick what the GIF is for. Chat is 320 px at 12 fps with 128 colours for messages and comments, Demo is 640 px at 12 fps for a README, a ticket or a product page, and Best is 800 px at 20 fps for when size matters less. The three menus below are what the presets set, and you can change any of them. Press Convert and the finished GIF replaces the preview and loops in place, with its real size and a Download button. Change anything and the preview comes back, ready for another conversion.

The watermark is placed relative to the finished picture: put it in the bottom-right corner, crop the video to a square, and it is still in the bottom-right corner of the square. A JPG logo's white background can be made transparent with one switch. The logo and its position are kept in your browser, and Use last watermark puts it back on the next video. It is never added on its own.

Frame rate, width and colours

A GIF is a stack of full pictures, so its size grows with frames × pixels. Width is the biggest lever: halving it quarters the pixels. 320 px is enough inline in a chat, 480 to 640 px suits a web page or a README, and 800 px is already large. 10 to 12 fps looks smooth for most motion; 20 to 30 only pays off for fast action and roughly doubles the file. The tool never makes more frames than the video has, so a 24 fps clip set to 30 fps gives 24.

Each frame gets its own 256-colour palette taken from its own pixels, so a cut to a different scene does not tint the whole GIF. Dithering breaks the remaining banding into a fine pattern; turn it off under Advanced for flat interface recordings, where the pattern counts as change. With Only store changed pixels on, the parts of the picture that stay the same from one frame to the next are stored once, and frames with no change at all are merged into a longer pause. A screen recording of a dialog box can come out at a tenth of the size of a handheld clip of the same length.

Formats and limits

Input: MP4, M4V, MOV, WebM and MKV with H.264, HEVC, VP8, VP9 or AV1 video, as far as your browser can decode it. iPhone clips are HEVC by default; Safari, Chrome and Edge decode it, Firefox may not, and the page says so when it cannot. WebM files from browser recorders often have no duration in the header; the real length is read from the frames. There is no limit on the size of the input file. The selected part is capped at 60 seconds, because a GIF that long at 480 px is usually tens of megabytes. Output is a standard GIF89a that loops forever by default; turn Loop forever off under Advanced for a GIF that plays once.

Where it is used

A reaction or a game moment for a chat; a two-to-eight-second screen recording of a bug or a feature for a support reply, an issue or a README, where a GIF plays without a click; a short product shot for a web page or an email; a captioned clip for a meme. To cut a longer recording down first, Trim Video does it without re-encoding. A single still comes from Video to Image, and a clip that plays sideways is fixed by Rotate Video.