Turn a video into a GIF

What the editor's GIF is like

• Width: at most 640 pixels, whatever size you choose. A landscape GIF is 640 × 360, a square one 640 × 640, a vertical one 640 × 1138.
• Frames: up to 15 a second, smooth enough for most motion while keeping the file in check.
• Colors: a GIF holds 256 colors per picture. Octoolo builds a palette from your clip and dithers the rest, so skies and gradients show a fine pattern of dots.
• Loop: it plays again and again, forever.
• Sound: none, because a GIF cannot hold any.

Everything on the timeline goes into it: trims, speed changes, crops, titles and pictures laid over the video. Several clips in a row become one GIF, so a short sequence or a before-and-after works too. Before you save, the Export window lists the GIF's exact size in pixels and how long it runs.

Keeping a GIF small

A GIF stores its frames as pictures, so its size grows with its width, height, length and how much moves in it. A few habits help more than any setting:

• Keep it short. Every second adds up to 15 pictures: 3 seconds hold 45, 10 seconds 150. Cut to the one moment that matters.
• Prefer landscape or square to vertical. A vertical GIF is 640 × 1138, about three times the pixels of a landscape one.
• Speed it up. At 2× a clip lasts half as long and has half the frames.
• Calm backgrounds shrink far better than leaves, water or a shaking camera.

The Export window estimates the size before anything is written. If it is still too big for where the GIF is going, animated WebP from the converter, below, makes a much smaller file.

Whole videos to GIF or WebP, in a batch

For an animated picture of a whole file, or of many files, with no editing, Convert video in Converters has three formats under Animated:

The pixel limits are for the short side. WebP keeps full color and makes much smaller files than GIF, and current browsers show it; GIF still plays in more places. APNG, an animated PNG in full color, is the third choice. The converter cannot trim, and long videos make very big animated pictures, so cut them in the editor first. In short: use the editor when the clip needs cutting, cropping or words, and the converter when your files already are the right moments. MP4 to GIF has more on converting whole files.

Captions, memes and reactions

Most GIFs are reactions, and the words make them. The Meme style puts bold white capitals with a black outline at the top of the frame; Caption puts a line of text on a dark box at the bottom. Use one or both, change the words, font and color, and set when each one appears, so a punchline can land a second in.

Not every GIF is a joke. They are handy wherever a video is awkward: one step of a how-to on a help page, a bug shown in a report, a moving picture on a slide. Short words on screen, such as "Click Save", make those clearer too.

Text is drawn into every frame, so it shows wherever the GIF goes. Stickers and logos are pictures: put a PNG on the Pictures lane above the clip and resize it right on the frame. For more on styles, fonts and timing, see add text to a video.