Donaldson R F Video to GIF
Make an animated GIF from a short part of a video. The tool builds a custom colour palette for your clip, so the colours look far better than a quick conversion. Nothing is uploaded.
How it works
A GIF can show only 256 colours at a time, so a plain conversion of a video looks blotchy. This tool makes two passes over the clip: the first finds the best 256 colours for your footage (a “palette”), the second paints every frame with that palette. Dithering mixes dots of those colours to imitate the ones that are missing; it hides banding in gradients but makes the file larger.
The work is done by ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly. That engine is about 31 MB. It is downloaded only when you press Make GIF, checked against a known fingerprint, and stored in your browser, so the next time it starts at once. It runs in the background, so the page stays responsive, and you can press Cancel at any time.
Keeping the file small
GIF is an old format with very weak compression, so a few seconds can easily become several megabytes. The size grows with the width squared, with the frame rate and with the length: halving the width makes the file about four times smaller. The page shows an estimated size range before you start and warns you when it may be over about 15 MB, which many websites and chat apps refuse or struggle with. The length is limited to seconds and the width to 640 pixels for that reason. For longer clips, share a short MP4 instead: it is usually ten to fifty times smaller than the same GIF.
Frequently asked questions
Is my video uploaded?
No. The only download is the conversion engine itself. Your video is opened directly from your disk and never sent anywhere.
Is there sound?
No. GIF files cannot carry sound.
Will it work with protected videos?
No. Videos protected by copy protection (DRM), such as many downloaded films or streaming-service files, cannot be read. Only use videos you have the right to use.
Related tools: Trim & Cut Video, Extract Frames from Video, Compress Video.