Turn a video into a GIF

A GIF plays silently, small and on repeat, often in a feed where people give it a second or two. Moments that work under those conditions share a few traits:

• One clear action. A shrug, a jump, a door slamming, a dog catching a ball. If it needs the sound or the scene before it to make sense, it won’t land.
• Short. Two to five seconds covers most reactions. Longer GIFs grow quickly in size and lose people before the payoff.
• Readable small. Close-ups beat wide shots. If the action is a speck in the corner, crop in with Shape or choose another moment.
• Steady. A tripod shot or a still background makes a cleaner and much smaller GIF than a shaky handheld one, because unchanged pixels are only stored once.

Use footage you filmed yourself or have the right to share. For a clip in a video you already own, open the file and trim to the scene; loop.video doesn’t fetch videos from websites.

Most video is 16:9, which shows up as a thin strip on a phone held upright. Cropping before the export makes the GIF fill more of the screen and removes pixels you would otherwise pay for in file size.

• 1:1 is the safest choice for chats, avatars-in-motion and forum posts.
• 9:16 fills a phone screen, for Stories and anything viewed full screen.
• 4:5 is the tallest shape most feeds show without cropping.
• Original keeps the full frame, for screen recordings where every edge matters.

After choosing a shape, drag the preview sideways (or up and down) to frame the subject, or use the Position slider for fine control.

A GIF jumps straight from its last frame back to its first. When those two frames look different, the jump repeats every few seconds and draws the eye. Three tools help:

1. Find the best loop compares frames across the clip and moves the handles to the start and end that match most closely, with a score from Excellent match to Poor match.
2. Crossfade under Join dissolves the last part of the loop into the first, so even footage that never repeats loops softly. Keep it short (a quarter to half a second) for a GIF.
3. Blend mixes a few frames either side of the join to soften a small nudge without changing the length.

A GIF that runs forward and then backwards to hide the join is a different effect that this tool doesn’t make. For background on why some loops look endless and others don’t, read the seamless loop guide.

A cinemagraph is a GIF where most of the picture stands still and one detail keeps moving: steam from a cup, hair in the wind, a flickering sign. In More options, turn on Freeze everything except a painted area and paint over the part that should move. The rest freezes on the frame you choose with Use the current frame.

Cinemagraphs also make unusually small GIFs, because the frozen area costs almost nothing after the first frame. The cinemagraph maker has the full technique.

Both loop by themselves and neither has sound. A GIF opens absolutely everywhere but is limited to 256 colours per frame. An animated WebP has full colour and is typically much smaller; every current browser shows it, though some apps and email programs still don’t. loop.video can export WebP in Chrome, Edge and Firefox (not Safari).

When to skip the GIF altogether

If the destination takes video and you want sound or full HD, export an MP4: it is smaller and sharper than either image format. For a GIF that needs to become a video, go the other way with GIF to MP4.