GIF vs MP4: which should you use?

Why GIFs are so large

An animated GIF is a stack of still images played one after another. Each frame is compressed losslessly, on its own, with an old method that works well on flat areas of colour and badly on anything photographic. There's no motion prediction: if a person moves their head, the GIF has to store those pixels again rather than describing how they moved.

Modern video codecs work the other way. They store a full picture only occasionally and, in between, mostly record what changed from one frame to the next. For a typical clip, very little changes, so the video needs a fraction of the data. That's why converting a GIF to MP4 commonly makes it many times smaller.

Why GIFs look grainy

A GIF frame can use at most 256 colours. A video frame can use millions. Smooth gradients — skies, skin, shadows, soft lighting — have far more shades than that, so a GIF has to round them to the nearest of its 256, which shows up as banding, or scatter dots of different colours to fake the in-between tones, which looks like grain. Screen recordings, cartoons, logos and simple graphics have few colours, which is why they make the best GIFs.

GIF and MP4 side by side

When GIF still makes sense

• Places that only accept images — many email newsletters, forums, documentation pages, issue trackers and README files show a GIF where a video wouldn't play at all.
• Short, simple loops — a two-second reaction, a spinner, a quick before-and-after of a screen.
• Screen recordings of interfaces, which have few colours and lots of unchanging areas, so they stay reasonably small.
• Animations that must play without a click, with no sound, everywhere.

For anything longer than a few seconds, anything filmed with a camera, or anything with sound, MP4 is the better choice. Many websites and apps already know this: animated images people upload are often converted to video behind the scenes, so they load faster.

How to make a small GIF from a clip

A GIF's size grows with three things: the number of pixels in each frame, the number of frames per second, and the number of seconds. Video to GIF lets you control all three:

1. Add your video and set Start at to the moment you want, in seconds.
2. Keep Length short. It can be 0.5 to 20 seconds; two to four is usually enough for a reaction or a demo.
3. Choose Smoothness: 8 fps gives the smallest file, 12 fps is the default, and 15 fps is the smoothest.
4. Choose Width: 320, 480 or 640 px. A clip that's narrower than the width you pick isn't enlarged.
5. Click Make GIF and download it.

Each frame gets its own 256-colour palette, so colours are matched to what's on screen at that moment. Footage that is steady, well lit and simple in colour gives the cleanest and smallest results; shaky, grainy or busy footage gives the largest. Video to GIF needs a browser with WebCodecs and OffscreenCanvas, such as a recent version of Chrome, Edge or Safari.

Tip: Halving the width cuts the pixels in each frame to a quarter, and going from 15 to 8 fps nearly halves the frames. Together they shrink a GIF far more than any other setting.

Making a GIF from still images

To animate photos, screenshots or drawings rather than a video, use GIF Maker. Add 2 to 100 images, put them in order, and set the time each one shows (0.1 to 10 seconds), the width (320 to 800 px) and whether it loops forever. Images of different sizes are scaled to fit inside the first one's frame, centred on white, so nothing is stretched.

Turning a GIF into a video

Going the other way is usually the bigger win. GIF to MP4 converts up to 20 GIFs at a time into MP4 or WebM. Each frame keeps its own timing from the GIF, so the animation plays at the same speed. MP4 has no transparency, so transparent areas become white. Use the video wherever video is accepted — on your own website, in social posts, or anywhere a GIF is too large to upload.