Pick a stretch of an MP4 and save it as a looping GIF that plays where a video wouldn't start by itself. Nothing is uploaded, and there’s no account or watermark.
Drop your MP4 file on the page or tap to choose it. The player loads it and selects the first 5 seconds.
Find the moment you want: scrub with the slider, press “Set start here” on the first frame and “Set end here” on the last, then check it with “Play selection”.
Set “Frame rate”, “Width” and “Colors”. The line under the options shows the GIF's dimensions, its number of frames and an estimated weight.
Press “Create GIF” and, once the preview plays, press Download to save the .gif with the same name as your MP4.
An MP4 almost always holds H.264 or HEVC video, which saves space between frames. It stores a complete picture only now and then and describes the frames in between as movement and small changes. A talking head in front of a still wall costs almost nothing after the first frame.
GIF has no motion prediction at all. Each frame is packed on its own as a palette image with LZW compression, which is lossless and works on rows of identical pixels, not on what moved. The same few seconds therefore often weigh 5 to 20 times more as a GIF than in the MP4 they came from, and noisy phone footage is the worst case.
Color takes a hit too. The MP4 can show millions of shades, while a GIF frame is limited to 256. filetidy's default builds one shared palette for the whole selection so colors stay steady, and you can switch to a palette per frame when scenes differ a lot.
The MP4's sound track is dropped, since GIF has no audio, and so is its metadata, including any location written by a phone. Only the frames between your start and end are decoded, which keeps the job quick even on a long file.
Android
This is a Samsung feature, and the button's position depends on the One UI version. Other Android phones have no built-in equivalent.
Mac
The action converts the whole file. Trim a long MP4 first in QuickTime Player with Edit > Trim.
Reaction GIF for a chat: keep 2 to 4 seconds, 10 or 15 fps, 320 or 480 px wide, with “Balanced (256 colors)”. That usually lands at a few megabytes and loads instantly in a conversation.
Product demo in a README, pull request or bug report: record the screen to MP4, select just the interaction, and use 10 fps at 640 or 800 px so text stays readable. Interfaces have few colors, so “Smaller file (64 colors)” often looks identical and saves a lot. Stay under the 10 MB warning, since many sites refuse heavier images.
Slides and email: presentation apps show a GIF as an image that animates on its own, with no play button to click. Many email programs don't play embedded video but do display animated GIFs; some desktop versions of Outlook on Windows only show the first frame, so make that frame meaningful on its own.
If the destination can play video, as most social networks and messaging apps do, keep the MP4: it is smaller, sharper and keeps the sound. Convert to GIF only for places where the clip must start by itself and loop.
Yes, that is the normal way to use it. Scrub to a moment and press “Set start here” or “Set end here”, or type times in seconds (12.5) or minutes and seconds (1:02.5). The selection length is shown live, and only that part is converted.
Shorten the selection first, since every second removed saves its share of frames. Then drop the frame rate from 15 to 10 fps, then the width from 640 to 480 px. Switching to 64 colors helps most on screen recordings and least on camera footage.
It is ignored. A GIF can only hold pictures, so the result is silent whatever the source contains. To keep the audio, share a trimmed MP4 rather than a GIF.
Often, yes. Some MP4 files use HEVC, which a few browsers can't show. Type the start and end times by hand; if the browser can't decode the frames at all, filetidy downloads a one-time compatibility encoder and decodes them with it.
“Smaller file (64 colors)” is usually enough for app windows, code and slides, which use flat colors. If the recording shows photos or video, go back to “Balanced (256 colors)” to avoid banding.
No. Your browser reads the MP4 locally, decodes the selected frames and writes the GIF in a background worker. The file never travels over the network, and the GIF is saved directly to your device.
Last updated October 28, 2026