GIF Maker

Up to twenty images, together no more than 25 MB and 20 megapixels. The GIF itself is produced at a maximum of 1200 by 1200 pixels. Those limits exist for your browser: encoding happens entirely on your own device and a GIF stores each frame uncompressed, so without a ceiling working memory fills up fast. Within those limits use is free and unlimited — no account, no watermark, no daily count.

Yes, you set the delay per frame. The practical floor is two hundredths of a second; that is a constraint of the GIF format itself, which stores the delay in hundredths. For a banner alternating between two messages, something like one and a half to three seconds per frame works well — fast enough to catch the eye, slow enough to read. For smooth motion you are closer to a tenth of a second per frame.

That is the format. A GIF holds at most 256 colours per animation, while a photo easily has hundreds of thousands. This tool builds the palette from your own images: it counts which colours actually occur and divides the available slots among them. A sunset therefore gets plenty of orange and red tones, a forest photo plenty of green. With illustrations, screenshots and logos in flat colours you will barely see a difference. With photos containing soft transitions — a sky, skin, a gradient — banding appears, and the fewer colours you pick, the stronger it gets. For photographic material a short video or an animated WebP remains a better format than a GIF.

Three controls matter, in this order. The number of colours is the strongest: going from 256 to 16 colours easily makes an animation three times smaller. Dimensions count quadratically — halve the width and height and roughly three quarters of the bytes disappear. And fewer images means fewer frames to store. The file size shown is not an estimate but the actual file: the animation is rebuilt in your browser on every change, so you see straight away what a choice costs. Do note that a GIF containing photos always stays sizeable; for email or a web page a short MP4 or WebP is often ten times smaller.

No. Every image is read by your browser and the GIF is encoded on the spot — compression included — without anything reaching our server. Nothing is logged and nothing is kept. That is also why twenty large images can take a moment: that computation happens on your machine, not in a data centre.