Images to GIF
Build an animated GIF from stills, with a palette pass so the colors stay clean.
Your file
Drop a file here, or click to choose
It stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Settings
Frame timing
Seconds per frame sets the speed for the whole animation. 0.1 s is a brisk 10 frames a second, which suits a walk cycle or a scrolling capture. 0.5 s reads as a slideshow. 1 s or more is a series of pictures rather than an animation.
Size
Every frame is stored nearly in full, so file size scales directly with frame count and width. Twenty frames at 480 px is a manageable GIF. A hundred frames at 800 px is not something you should put on a web page.
The order the frames go in
Frames play in the order they appear in the list, and the list can be reordered before you run. The thing that catches people out is filenames: a set exported as frame1.png through frame12.png sorts as 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3 in almost every file picker, because it is sorting text rather than numbers. Zero-padding the names, frame01.png to frame12.png, fixes it permanently and is worth doing at the point of export. Otherwise, check the list and reorder before pressing Run.
Why the colors hold up
A GIF can only hold 256 colors per frame, and the naive approach picks those 256 from a fixed web palette, which is what makes most converted GIFs look like they were made in 1998. This tool runs two passes instead: the first walks your actual images and builds a palette from the colors that are really in them, and the second maps the frames onto that palette. A set of photographs with a consistent look comes out close to the originals. A set with wildly different color between frames is the hard case, since one shared palette has to serve all of them.
Banding in smooth gradients is the limit you cannot design around. It is not a bug in the palette; it is 256 colors trying to describe a sunset.
When not to use GIF at all
GIF is a poor video format that survives because it plays inline everywhere and needs no player. If the destination accepts video, a short MP4 or WebM will be a fraction of the size at better quality, and images to video builds one from the same stack of stills. Use GIF for a README, a chat window, an email signature or a forum that strips video tags. Use video anywhere that will take it.
If your frames came out of a clip in the first place, MP4 to GIF goes straight from the video and gives you frame rate and trimming controls rather than a per-frame delay.
Common questions
Why do the colors look different from my PNGs?
GIF holds 256 colors per frame. The tool builds a palette from your actual images, which is as good as GIF gets, but gradients still band.
Can the background be transparent?
Not in this tool. The output is fully opaque.