GIF Maker

Making an animated GIF from frames

An animated GIF is a sequence of still images displayed one after another to create motion, like a flipbook. This maker takes the images you add, in order, and assembles them into a single looping GIF with the timing you choose.

The images become frames in the order you add them, so add them in the sequence you want them to play. The frame delay controls how long each is shown, which is what sets the speed of the animation.

Why GIF, and its trade-offs

The GIF format is ancient by web standards, dating to 1987, and it has real limitations — yet it persists because it does one thing uniquely well: it plays automatically, loops forever, and works absolutely everywhere without a video player, a click, or any special support. You can paste a GIF into a chat, an email, a document or a forum and it just plays. No video format matches that universality.

The cost is efficiency. GIF is limited to 256 colours per frame, so photographs and complex gradients look banded and posterised. And GIF files are large — often several times bigger than an equivalent short video, because the format compresses poorly. A few seconds of animation can run to several megabytes.

Managing file size

Two settings control the size of your GIF most directly. Dimensions matter enormously, since every frame stores every pixel: halving the width quarters the data. The maximum width control here lets you cap this, and for most uses — a reaction GIF, a simple animation, a demonstration — a width of a few hundred pixels is plenty.

The number of frames matters equally. Every frame adds to the file, so a GIF with fifty frames is far larger than one with ten. Using fewer frames with a slightly longer delay each often produces an acceptable animation at a fraction of the size.

Choosing the frame delay

The delay is how long each frame stays on screen. Around a hundred milliseconds produces smooth, fairly quick motion; several hundred gives a deliberate, slideshow-like pace. There is no correct value — it depends on what you are animating. A subtle effect wants slow timing; a snappy reaction wants fast. The preview lets you judge it.

Bear in mind that very short delays are not always honoured. Many browsers and viewers historically enforced a minimum frame time, so setting an extremely fast delay may not play as fast as the number suggests.

What GIFs are good and bad for

GIFs suit short, looping, low-colour animations: simple logos in motion, UI demonstrations, reaction clips, pixel art, diagrams that animate through steps. They are poorly suited to anything long, anything photographic, or anything needing sound. For a screen recording or a video clip of any length, an actual video format is smaller and looks better — GIF is the wrong tool for those despite being commonly misused for them.

Rendered in your browser

The GIF is assembled entirely on your device using a JavaScript encoder. Your images are never uploaded. Rendering is computationally intensive, so a GIF with many large frames may take a little time.

Frequently Asked Questions