Make a GIF from your photos

📱 GIFs and stickers for WhatsApp: use your phone

Open this page on your phone, make the GIF and save it to your camera roll. Sent straight into a chat it plays right away — two photos or twenty — though any see-through parts turn white there. Want a real sticker with the transparency kept? Install a sticker app for WhatsApp from your app store, put at least three saved GIFs into a pack, and send the pack to WhatsApp: they arrive as animated stickers, see-through parts intact. From a computer, WhatsApp freezes GIFs and there is no way to add animated stickers at all — use the computer for websites, documents and e-mail, where every GIF simply works.

How to make a GIF that works everywhere

A GIF is a still-image format from 1987 that happens to hold more than one picture, and that single fact explains almost everything about it. It stores at most 256 colours per frame, it has no modern compression, and it has no audio channel at all — a GIF can never carry sound, whatever tool you use. What it does have is compatibility nothing else comes close to: a GIF plays in every browser, every e-mail client, every chat app and every document viewer, with no plugin, no codec and no play button. That is why a format older than most of its users refuses to die.

Choosing your photos and the frame speed

Every photo becomes one frame, in the order shown in the list — use the arrow buttons to rearrange before you press Make GIF. For something meant to be read (a greeting, a before-and-after, a product from several sides) 0.5 to 1 second per frame is the sweet spot: fast enough to feel alive, slow enough to actually see each picture. Pick 0.2 s only when your photos are nearly identical, such as frames pulled from a video; at that speed a viewer perceives motion rather than images. Two frames at 1 s already make a convincing blink or nod, so you usually need far fewer pictures than you would think. It also pays to crop your photos to the same shape beforehand, because frames of differing proportions end up letterboxed inside the largest one.

Why the file gets big, and what to do about it

Because there is no modern compression, file size grows with width × height × number of frames — and it grows fast. Ten photos at 640 px can easily weigh several megabytes, while the same ten at 320 px land in the hundreds of kilobytes. If your result feels too heavy, drop the max size one step before you start deleting frames: halving the width removes about three quarters of the pixels, which does far more than cutting a photo or two. Photographs with fine gradients — a sky, a skin tone — suffer most from the 256-colour limit and can show visible banding, while flat graphics, logos and text survive beautifully. This tool also rounds the output to even dimensions automatically, because odd sizes break the silent video conversion that some chat apps run in the background.

Transparent or white: decide before you send

A GIF has no alpha channel. It can flag one single palette colour as see-through, which means a pixel is either fully visible or fully gone — there is no half-transparency as in a PNG. A soft, anti-aliased edge is therefore snapped to one or the other, and a logo with a feathered outline will look slightly harder than the original. That is a limit of the format, not of your image. White is preselected here for a reason: it plays everywhere. Choose transparent only when the GIF is going onto a website, into a document or into a sticker pack, where a transparent background is the whole point.

Where your GIF will play — and where it will not

This is the part almost nobody writes down, so here is what we established by testing it ourselves rather than by reading it somewhere. On websites, in documents and in e-mail, every GIF simply works, transparency included — that is the format's home turf. Chat apps are the awkward case, and WhatsApp in particular behaves differently depending on which device sent the file. A GIF made and sent from a phone plays in the chat every time, whether it has two frames or twenty; any see-through parts turn white on arrival. The very same file sent from a computer arrives frozen as a single still image. If you need both the animation and the transparency, the route is a sticker pack: save your GIFs to the camera roll, put at least three of them into a pack with a sticker app from your app store, and send the pack to WhatsApp — they arrive as animated stickers with the see-through parts intact. Adding animated stickers from a Windows or Mac computer is not possible at all.

GIF, video or sticker: which one do you actually want?

Take a GIF when the thing has to play by itself, anywhere, without anyone pressing anything: a signature, a banner, a step-by-step in a manual, a greeting in an e-mail. Take a video when there is sound, when the clip runs longer than a few seconds, or when it is photographic footage where colour banding would show — the file will be smaller and sharper than the equivalent GIF, at the cost of needing a player. Take a sticker when it is meant for a chat and has to keep a transparent background. A GIF is the only one of the three you can hand to somebody with no explanation attached, which is exactly why it is still here.

Why GIFs are kept small

GIF is a 1987 format with a maximum of 256 colours per frame and no modern compression — files grow shockingly fast with size and frame count. That's why this tool caps the dimensions; for smooth photographic animation a video format is technically better, but nothing beats a GIF for compatibility: it plays literally everywhere.