How to make a GIF from a video or photos, on any device

Every GIF starts from one of three things: footage you already have, a set of still pictures, or a template that does the animating for you. Pick the row that matches what you have.

Whichever you choose, the result is the same kind of file: a stack of still frames, each with its own display time and its own palette of up to 256 colors, plus a note telling the viewer how many times to loop. The illustration at the top of this guide shows the idea, and that structure explains almost every setting further down.

Turning a video into a GIF means sampling stills from a few seconds of footage. The free video to GIF maker on this site does it in the browser, so the clip never leaves your phone or computer, which matters for screen recordings of work apps and private family videos.

1. 1Open the GIF maker and drop in an MP4, MOV or WEBM file, or tap to choose one from your phone.
2. 2Play or scrub through the video, then press Start here and End here to mark the part you want. Two to six seconds is the usual length for a GIF.
3. 3Choose the frames per second. Ten is smooth enough for most clips; use 15 to 25 only for fast motion such as sport or gaming, because each step up adds frames and file size.
4. 4Press Add frames. The frames appear in a strip, where you can delete the slow start, duplicate a frame to hold a moment, or reverse the whole clip.
5. 5Set the width (480 pixels suits most chats and web pages) and choose Loop forever.
6. 6Press Make GIF, check the preview and its file size, then download it.

Pick a clip where the camera stays still if you can. A locked-off shot of someone reacting compresses far better than a handheld shot of the same moment, because only the moving parts of each frame have to be stored again. The size test further down puts numbers on that.

A set of still images becomes a GIF the same way a flip book works: each picture is one frame, shown for a set time before the next. Holiday photos, product shots from several angles, the steps of a recipe or a series of drawings all work.

1. 1Add your JPG, PNG, WEBP or HEIC pictures to the online GIF creator. You can add more at any time; new pictures join the end of the strip.
2. 2Put them in order: select a frame and use Move earlier or Move later, or Reverse to flip the whole sequence.
3. 3Set the time per frame. For a photo slideshow, 500 ms to 1.5 seconds gives people time to look; for stop motion, 80 to 150 ms makes movement look continuous.
4. 4Choose a shape. Like the first frame keeps your first picture’s proportions; square suits chats and profile pictures, and tall 9:16 suits stories.
5. 5Choose Show the whole picture to fit every image inside the frame, or Fill the frame to crop the edges so nothing is letterboxed.
6. 6Pick the loop, press Make GIF and download.

Photos taken seconds apart make the smoothest animations, so burst shots are ideal. For stop motion, keep the camera on a stand and lock the exposure, otherwise the brightness flickers from frame to frame. If one picture needs straightening or trimming before it goes in, crop it first and add the cropped copy.

Phones can make simple GIFs with their own apps. What each one can do depends on the brand, so the options below stick to what Apple and Samsung document, and say where a feature comes from third-party guides instead. For full control over speed, size and colors on any phone, the browser route works the same as on a computer.

Templates do the animating for you: you supply a photo or a caption, and the motion is already designed. They are the quickest way to make a GIF for a message, a birthday or a group chat.

• The “my beloved” meme: the heart locket GIF maker puts your photo in a red locket that swings open beside a caption, or beside a second photo.
• Custom emoji: turn a GIF into a Discord or Slack emoji, squared, resized and fitted under each platform’s limit (256 KB on Discord, 128 KB on Slack).
• Animated logos and icons: if the animation is an SVG, convert the SVG to a GIF so it plays in places that do not support SVG, such as email.

Photoshop builds GIFs from layers, which suits designers who want to edit individual frames. The steps below use the frame animation timeline in current versions.

1. 1Load the pictures as layers with File › Scripts › Load Files into Stack. For a video, use File › Import › Video Frames to Layers and choose the range.
2. 2Open Window › Timeline, then choose Create Frame Animation in the middle of the panel.
3. 3In the Timeline panel menu, choose Make Frames From Layers. Each layer becomes one frame.
4. 4Set each frame’s delay from the small menu under its thumbnail, and set the loop at the bottom of the panel to Forever.
5. 5Export with File › Export › Save for Web (Legacy). Choose GIF, set the colors (128 is a good start), turn dithering on or off, check the file size in the corner of the preview, and save.

Photoshop gives frame-by-frame control, at the cost of a subscription and a dozen steps. For putting pictures or a clip in order and getting a clean, small GIF, the browser tool covers the same settings in a minute.

Five settings decide how a GIF looks and how large it is. Here is what each one does, and a starting point for common uses.

To see which settings matter most, we made the same 3-second clip with this site’s GIF encoder, changing one setting at a time. One version is a slow camera pan across a detailed landscape, so every pixel changes in every frame, like most phone footage. The other holds the same picture still with one small object moving across it, which is what screen recordings and tripod shots look like.

Three things stand out. First, content beats settings: the still shot is 50 times smaller than the pan at identical dimensions, because the encoder only stores pixels that change. Second, on footage that moves, frame rate scales the size almost exactly: double the frames, double the file. Third, cutting colors from 255 to 64 saved 38 percent, while dithering added 23 percent. Your own numbers will differ with the footage, but the order of these levers holds.

Work down this list in order and stop once the GIF fits. The first steps save the most and cost the least quality.

1. 1Trim the clip. Cut slow starts and endings; every second you remove is a second you do not store.
2. 2Lower the frame rate. Going from 20 to 10 frames per second roughly halves a moving clip.
3. 3Crop to the action. Less moving background means fewer changed pixels per frame, which was the biggest factor in the size test.
4. 4Reduce the width. 480 pixels is enough for most places a GIF is shown; 320 for chat.
5. 5Use fewer colors, and switch dithering off unless the GIF shows banding.
6. 6Compress what is left. The GIF compressor can fit a finished GIF to a target size such as 256 KB or 5 MB, trading a little detail for a much smaller file.

If the GIF is still too large after all that, the honest answer is that GIF is the wrong format for this clip. A short MP4 or WebP keeps far more quality at a fraction of the size, as the comparison below shows. For still images that are too heavy, the guide on reducing image size without losing quality covers JPG, PNG and WebP.

A GIF can mark one color in each frame’s palette as transparent. A pixel is either fully see-through or fully solid; there is nothing in between. That works well for stickers, icons and cut-outs with crisp edges, and it is why soft edges look rough.

Smooth edges in a photo or a PNG are built from half-transparent pixels that blend into whatever is behind them. A GIF has to round each of those to solid or clear, so curves look stepped, and the solid ones keep the color of the background they were cut from. That is the white or dark halo you see when a GIF made on white is placed on a dark page.

• To make a transparent GIF from pictures, start from PNG cut-outs and choose Transparent as the GIF maker’s background.
• To make an existing animation transparent, use the GIF background remover, which clears the background frame by frame and can also fill it with a new color.
• To avoid halos, cut the image out against a color close to the page it will sit on, or keep shapes crisp and skip soft shadows.

For still images with transparent backgrounds, and why PNG handles soft edges better than GIF, see the guide to transparent backgrounds.

GIF dates from 1987 and its animation and transparency from 1989. It survives because it plays everywhere without a play button. The newer formats are smaller and look better, but neither is accepted everywhere a GIF is.

Choose GIF for chats, emoji, email and anywhere that asks for one. Choose MP4 for anything longer than a few seconds, anything with sound, and for social networks, many of which turn uploaded GIFs into video anyway. To switch a finished GIF, the GIF to MP4 converter keeps the exact frame timing; it turned our 2.1 MB test GIF into a 184 KB MP4. Choose animated WebP for your own website when you need transparency or a smaller file. The image formats guide covers WebP in more depth.