Make a GIF from still images, privately
A short animated GIF is still one of the easiest ways to show something move: a product turning through four angles, a before and after that flips back and forth, a three-step how-to, or a reaction made from a few photos. GIFs play almost everywhere, including in email and chat apps that won't autoplay video, which is why they have outlasted many newer formats.
This tool turns a set of still images into a GIF entirely in your browser. You add the images, put them in order, set how long each one shows and how the animation loops, and the GIF is encoded on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, so unreleased products, client work and personal photos stay where they are.
It is built for the narrow job of still images to animation, and does it carefully: animated files are refused rather than flattened, timing is shown as GIF actually stores it, and the finished file is read back and checked before you download it.
Building the timeline
Add your images and they appear as frames in the order you chose them. Drag a frame to a new position, or use the arrow buttons on each frame, which also work from the keyboard. Duplicate a frame to hold it for longer or to bounce back to it, and remove any you don't want. The same image can appear several times.
Every frame has its own delay. The default is 200 milliseconds, a comfortable pace for most slideshows; type a different value into any frame, or set one delay and apply it to all. Holding the first and last frames a little longer — say 800 milliseconds — gives viewers time to register where an animation starts and ends.
The preview above the timeline plays your frames at their delays, using small copies so it stays smooth. It pauses when you scroll it out of view, and if your device asks for reduced motion it starts paused. This preview shows order and timing; the real GIF, with its final colours, is previewed separately once it's made.
Size, fit and background
Choose the shape — matching the first image, square, portrait 4:5 or landscape 16:9 — and the longest side, from 240 up to 800 pixels. GIFs grow quickly with size because every frame is stored separately, so the smallest size that looks right is usually the best choice; the tool estimates the file size as you go.
Images whose shape doesn't match the GIF are either shown whole, with the background colour around them, or scaled to fill the frame with the edges cropped. Nothing is ever stretched. The background colour also replaces any transparency in your images, because GIF can only make a pixel fully transparent or fully opaque — soft edges against a chosen colour look far better than jagged ones against nothing.
Each frame is drawn from your original image at the chosen size, one at a time, so even large photos don't need to sit in memory together.
Colour: palettes and dithering
The biggest limit of the GIF format is colour. Each frame can contain at most 256 colours, picked to represent that frame as well as possible. For logos, screenshots, illustrations and flat graphics that is plenty. For photographs, smooth gradients like skies and skin can show visible steps, called banding.
Dithering is the classic answer. Instead of rounding each pixel to the nearest available colour, the tool spreads the rounding error to neighbouring pixels, which turns bands into a fine, even grain that the eye blends back into a gradient. It usually looks better on photos and makes files a little larger. Try it both ways; the result preview shows the real encoded GIF.
By default each frame gets its own palette. When neighbouring frames are very similar — a slow zoom or a product turning — tiny palette differences can make colours shimmer. One palette for all frames, built from small samples of every frame, keeps colours steady. Very different frames are usually better with their own palettes.
Encoding, checking and downloading
When you press Make GIF, frames are drawn one by one and handed to an encoder running in a background worker, so the page stays responsive and shows progress frame by frame. Cancel stops it straight away and frees the memory it was using; your frames and settings stay exactly as they were, ready to try again with a smaller size if needed.
Before anything is offered for download, the finished file is read back with an independent GIF reader. It checks the size, the number of frames, every frame's delay as stored, and the loop setting against what you asked for. If anything doesn't match, you're told instead of being handed a file that's subtly wrong.
The result appears as the real animated GIF, with its file size, so you see exactly what you'll share. If your device asks for reduced motion, it waits for you to choose to play it. Then download it with one click.
Limits, and when to use something else
There are deliberate limits: up to 60 frames and 800 pixels on most computers, lower on phones and low-memory devices, and a cap on total pixels so encoding never runs a browser out of memory. They are about what a browser can do safely, not about any platform's rules, and they apply on every plan.
GIF is the most compatible animation format, but not the most efficient. For long or high-resolution animation, a short video file will usually be much smaller. For a single still image, our compression and conversion tools give far smaller files than a one-frame GIF.
A few habits keep GIFs small and sharp. Prepare frames at the same size and framing before you start, so nothing jumps between frames. Use the smallest longest side that still reads well where the GIF will appear — chat apps and email rarely show more than 480 pixels wide. Fewer, longer-held frames usually communicate a before-and-after or a three-step process better than many quick ones, and they make a much smaller file. Flat backgrounds compress far better than noisy photographic ones.