Free GIF Maker
Build an animated GIF from a set of images, or from a video clip. Reorder frames, set the speed, choose the output size, and download. No watermark, no account, and nothing is uploaded — the encoding happens in this tab, like the rest of the Switch Labs media tools.
Drop your images here, in any order. You can reorder them below.
PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF stills, and HEIC from an iPhone. Encoding runs in this tab; nothing is uploaded and nothing is watermarked.
Two different jobs
“Make a GIF” means two genuinely different things, so this tool has two modes rather than pretending they are the same.
Images to GIF
A sequence of stills becomes an animation: a photo burst, a set of design mockups, a before-and-after pair, frames you exported from an editor. Order and per-frame timing matter, and the encoder is gifenc, which is materially faster than running a video pipeline for a handful of pictures because it skips the container work entirely.
Video to GIF
A clip becomes a loop. What matters here is trimming to the right moment and picking a frame rate, so that mode gives you the full trimming interface from our video to GIF converter, running on FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly.
Making a GIF that is small enough to post
Most people making a GIF are making it in order to post it somewhere with a size limit, and finding out about the limit afterwards is the annoying part. The size readout under your finished GIF is the measured byte count, not an estimate, so you can check before you go anywhere.
The three levers, in order of how much they buy you:
- Output width. Size tracks total pixels, so halving the width takes roughly three quarters off. This is by far the strongest lever.
- Frame count. Size falls in proportion. Drop frames you do not need rather than speeding the whole thing up.
- Color count. Flat graphics, screenshots, and line art often look identical at 64 colors. Photographs start banding well before that.
If it is still too big, hand it to the GIF compressor, or for a specific target use the target-size page. For Discord specifically, the Discord GIF compressor carries the current tier limits. And if the clip is long or full of motion, converting to MP4 solves the problem outright instead of managing it.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a watermark?
No. Nothing is stamped onto the output at any size, on any setting, ever. The GIF is encoded in your browser and written straight to a download, so there is no point in the process where anything could be added to it.
Are my photos uploaded anywhere?
No. Images are decoded and encoded inside this browser tab. In image mode the encoder is gifenc running as JavaScript in the page; in video mode it is FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly. Neither transmits your files, so there is no server-side copy and nothing to delete afterwards.
Can I use iPhone photos?
Yes. HEIC and HEIF files are converted in the browser before encoding, so you can drop photos straight from an iPhone photo library without exporting them as JPEG first. Most GIF makers reject HEIC outright.
What frame delay should I use?
Between 80 and 150 milliseconds, which is roughly 7 to 12 frames per second, reads as smooth animation for most content. Slideshow-style GIFs of separate photos usually want much longer, 500 to 1000 milliseconds, so each image is readable. Below about 40 milliseconds some browsers clamp the delay anyway, so very fast GIFs may not play as fast as you set them.
Why is my GIF so large?
Because GIF size is essentially frames multiplied by pixels. Twenty frames at 720 pixels wide is four times the file of twenty frames at 360 pixels wide. Reduce the output width first, use fewer frames second, and drop the color count third. If it is still too big, compress it or convert it to MP4.
Should I use a shared palette or a per-frame palette?
Shared is right for most GIFs: one 256-color table for the whole animation gives a noticeably smaller file and looks fine when the frames are visually similar. Switch to per-frame when your frames are very different from each other, such as a slideshow of unrelated photos, where one shared palette has to compromise across all of them.
Related GIF tools
- GIF compressor — shrink a finished GIF
- GIF resizer — change dimensions without touching the animation
- GIF to MP4 — when GIF is the wrong format for the clip
- How to compress a GIF without losing quality — the tradeoffs, ranked
Related Tools
More free tools that might be useful
GIF Compressor
Compress and optimize GIF files
GIF Resizer
Resize animated GIFs while keeping the animation
Video to GIF Converter
Convert videos to animated GIFs with customization