GIF Maker: Make a GIF from Pictures or Video

Any set of still images can become a GIF: holiday photos, product shots from several angles, steps of a recipe, drawings for a stop-motion loop. Add them in one go or a few at a time; new pictures join the end of the frame list, and nothing is lost while you add more.

Pictures rarely share one shape, so the GIF needs a frame to put them in. "Like the first frame" uses the shape of your first picture; square, wide and tall are there for chats, slides and stories. With "Show the whole picture" every image fits inside the frame on a white, black or transparent background. "Fill the frame" crops the edges instead, so nothing is letterboxed. Need a picture straightened out first? Crop it and add the result.

For a slideshow GIF, 0.5 to 1.5 seconds per picture gives people time to look. To linger on one picture, select it and give it a longer time, or duplicate it. For the “my beloved” meme, the heart locket GIF maker builds the whole animation from one photo.

Add an MP4, MOV or WEBM file and the video opens in a player. Scrub to the moment you want, press Start here and End here, and choose how many frames per second to take. Ten frames per second looks smooth for most clips and keeps the file manageable; 15 to 25 suits fast motion, at a higher cost in size.

Keep video GIFs short. Three seconds at 10 frames per second is 30 frames, which is plenty for a reaction or a product demo. Each extra second adds as much file size as the first one did, because GIF stores every frame as a picture rather than as video.

The frames are taken by your browser, so any video it can play works. If a video will not open, it is usually in a format such as HEVC that this browser cannot decode; exporting it as an H.264 MP4 solves that.

Every GIF frame carries its own delay, stored in hundredths of a second. A delay of 100 ms is 10 frames per second; 40 ms is 25. Browsers treat delays shorter than 20 ms as broken and slow them to about 100 ms, so this tool never writes anything shorter than 20 ms — a GIF meant to be fast stays fast.

Frames you add from a GIF or a video keep the timing they came with. Pictures follow the time per frame you set, and any single frame can have its own time. "Use this time for every frame" resets them all at once. To retime a finished GIF without rebuilding it, use the GIF speed changer.

Loop forever is what people expect from a GIF. Play once suits an animation that should end on its last frame, such as a reveal in a slide. "Play forwards, then backwards" adds the frames in reverse after the last one, which makes a seamless back-and-forth loop out of a clip that would otherwise jump at the end.

GIF is an old format, and its files grow fast. Four settings decide the size, in this order: the number of frames, the width, the number of colors and dithering. Halving the width roughly quarters the file; halving the frames roughly halves it.

This maker already does the cheap savings for you. Pixels that do not change between frames are not stored again, and frames that come out identical are merged into one longer frame. That is why a screen recording or a GIF with a still background comes out much smaller than a moving camera shot of the same length.

For chat, 320 to 480 pixels wide is plenty. Choose Balanced or Smallest colors for flat artwork and screenshots, and turn dithering on only when a photo shows bands of color in the sky or on skin. Still too heavy? The GIF compressor fits it to an exact size.

Choose Transparent as the background and pictures with transparency, such as PNG cut-outs and stickers, keep it in the GIF. The padding around pictures that do not fill the frame becomes transparent too. Animated icons and logos saved as SVG convert directly with SVG to GIF.

GIF transparency is all or nothing for each pixel, so a soft shadow or anti-aliased edge becomes a crisp one. To cut the background out of an animation you already have, use the GIF background remover; to cut out a still picture first, the background remover saves a PNG you can add here.

Photoshop can make GIFs too. Load your images with File › Scripts › Load Files into Stack, open Window › Timeline and choose Create Frame Animation, then use Make Frames From Layers in the timeline menu. Set each frame's delay under its thumbnail, set the loop to Forever, and save with File › Export › Save for Web (Legacy), choosing GIF.

That route gives you layer-level control, but it needs a Photoshop subscription and a dozen steps. For putting pictures or a clip in order and getting a good-looking GIF, the tool above does the same job in a minute, on any device, for free.