What you can make
An animated GIF plays a series of images in a loop, everywhere: in chats, emails, forums, slide decks and websites, with no play button and no sound. This GIF Maker turns still images into one, for example:
- a before and after of a room, a haircut or a design change,
- a step-by-step sequence of screenshots for a how-to,
- a product spin from photos taken around an object,
- a slideshow of holiday photos or a stop-motion animation from drawings.
The images are processed in your browser, and the GIF has no watermark.
How the GIF is built
- Each image is drawn onto a frame of the size and shape you chose. Show whole image adds borders in your colour when the shapes differ; Fill and crop fills the frame and trims the overflow.
- If you set a fade, extra in-between frames blend each image into the next at 15 frames per second.
- GIF can store only 256 colours per frame, so each frame is reduced to its best 256 colours (median-cut quantisation), with optional dithering to hide banding in gradients.
- Frames are compressed with LZW, the method built into the GIF format, and written with their timings and loop setting.
Timing explained
GIF stores delays in hundredths of a second, so 1 second is a delay of 100. Browsers treat delays under 2 hundredths as “too fast” and slow them down, so the tool never goes below that.
Example: 6 images at 0.8 s each make a 4.8-second loop. Add a 0.3 s fade and each image is shown solid for about 0.5 s, then blends into the next for 0.3 s; the loop is still about 4.8 seconds. With Loop forever, the last image fades back into the first so the loop is seamless.
Keeping the file small
GIF is an old, inefficient format, so file size grows quickly. Roughly, size grows with pixels × frames:
| Change | Effect on size |
|---|---|
| 800 px → 480 px wide | About 60% smaller (a third of the pixels) |
| Add a 0.5 s fade between 10 images | Many more frames; often 2–5× bigger |
| Shared colours instead of per-image | Smaller, especially when images look alike |
| Dithering off | Smaller for flat graphics and screenshots |
Many chat apps and forums limit GIF uploads to around 8–10 MB (some to much less), and the tool warns you above 8 MB. For a long or smooth animation, a short MP4 video is far smaller; if your source is already a video, use Video to GIF or keep it as video.
Worked example: a before-and-after GIF
A gardener has two photos of a flower bed, before and after planting, both 4032 × 3024 pixels from a phone.
- Drop both photos in, with “before” first.
- Set Time per image to 1.5 s and Fade to 0.5 s.
- Keep Size at 480 px and Shape at “Same as the first image”: the GIF is 480 × 360.
- Click Make GIF. With per-image colours and the fade, the result is about 3 seconds per loop and usually a few hundred KB to a couple of MB.
If the two photos were taken from slightly different spots, crop them to match first with Crop Image, so the scene does not jump between frames.
Tips
- Same size in, smooth result out. Images with the same shape avoid borders. Resize Image can make a batch identical.
- Screenshots: choose “Shared” colours and switch dithering off for crisp text.
- Text on frames: add captions to each image with the Meme Generator first.
- iPhone photos in HEIC format need converting with HEIC to JPG first.
- Animated GIFs as input use only their first frame.