How to Make a GIF from a Video

By the FileStripe team · October 21, 2026 · 2 min read

Turn any MP4, MOV or WebM clip into a looping GIF: pick the moment, length, size and speed. Free, no watermark, works on phone and PC.

GIFs autoplay almost everywhere: chats, email, Slack, GitHub, forums and presentations, places where a video won't play inline. Here's how to make a good one.

Step by step

Open Video to GIF and choose your clip.
Set the start time and length (up to 30 seconds).
Choose frames per second and width, then click Make GIF.
Check the size, then download.

Getting the size down

GIF is a 1987 format with no modern compression, so GIFs get big fast. Size grows with width × height × frames. To keep a GIF under the common 8-10MB chat limits:

Keep it short. 2-5 seconds is the sweet spot for reactions and demos.
Use 10-12 fps. Smooth enough for most clips, half the size of 24 fps.
Use 320-480 px width. 480 px is plenty for chats.
Avoid noisy footage. Grain, confetti and water create huge GIFs.

Slow motion and fast forward

Set speed to 0.5× for dramatic slow-mo or 2× to compress a long action into a short loop. Speed changes the playback delay, not the number of frames, so it doesn't change file size much.

GIFs from photos instead

To animate a series of photos (a before/after, a product spin, a stop-motion), use the GIF maker. Add images, set the order and frame duration, and try "boomerang" for a back-and-forth loop.

Add captions

For a meme-style GIF, extract a frame with Video to JPG and add text with the meme generator for a still version that loads instantly.