Why I Built My Own GIF Converter

October 22, 2025 Updated November 9, 2026 4 min read About

It started with a few annoyances

Hi, I’m the developer who made this site. The little guy in glasses on the home page is saying hello for me.

Between work and side projects, I end up turning videos into GIFs pretty often. Writing a bug report, putting together a tutorial, writing a blog post… there are more moments that call for a GIF than you’d think.

What bugged me about the existing services

At first I just used online GIF converter sites, of course. But the more I used them, the more little problems I noticed.

That uneasy feeling of uploading my videos to some unknown server

Most services worked by uploading your file to a server somewhere overseas. Every time I converted a personal video or a recording of my work screen, I’d think, “Where is this file being stored?” and “Is it actually getting deleted?”

Slower than you’d expect

Upload the file, wait for the server to process it, download it again… even a short clip took a while. On a slow connection it got downright frustrating. And plenty of times, after all that waiting, I wasn’t even happy with what I got.

Disappointing quality

Free services had pretty limited quality settings. Getting high quality meant either paying or digging through overly complicated options. I just wanted something with “good enough” quality, made quickly, and that turned out to be surprisingly hard.

Free, until it isn’t

A lot of sites were free at first, but as soon as you tried to use them for anything real, they asked you to pay. Honestly, a monthly subscription just to make a few GIFs felt like a waste of money.

So I decided to build my own

“Wait, couldn’t a browser handle this just fine?”

These days you can do some pretty heavy work with nothing but a browser. After poking around for a while, I thought, “Okay, I’ll just build it myself.”

So here’s how I built this site:

Your files are never uploaded to a server. All the conversion happens inside the browser you’re using right now. Work files or personal videos, nothing leaves your computer.
No waiting on uploads or downloads. Pick a file and conversion starts right away. The trade-off is that it runs on your own device, so it can be slow on older hardware.
Settings that pick themselves. At first you had to enter the frame interval, size, quality, and FPS yourself, and it turned out that juggling four numbers was a chore in itself. Now they’re chosen automatically for each video’s length and resolution, and you only move one slider, from Low-spec to High-spec. How each level is decided is in the settings guide.
It’s free. Since there’s no server-side conversion, it costs almost nothing to run. There are ads to help keep the site going, but I won’t be locking any features away.

How does it work under the hood?

At first I was planning to use ffmpeg.wasm, which is ffmpeg compiled to WebAssembly. But after trying several approaches side by side, I ended up using a GIF encoder called gifski. The difference in color was pretty big. I wrote up the whole process in my dev log:

What’s next

When I first wrote this post I listed a few plans, and two of them are done.

~~Trimming GIFs~~ → added as the GIF Trim page
~~Adding text~~ → available in “Text Settings” after conversion
Aspect ratio presets like square and vertical
Converting multiple files at once
Merging GIFs

If you find yourself thinking “I wish it could do this,” let me know. I’ll work through requests one at a time, starting with whatever gets asked for most.

Wrapping up

In the end, this project started with wanting to build “a tool I’d actually want to use.” I figured other people probably had the same frustrations, so I made it public. It would honestly make me really happy if a lot of people found it useful.

If something’s inconvenient or there’s a feature you’d like added, feel free to tell me anytime through the contact page or in the comments below.