You want to turn the best few seconds of a clip into a GIF for a chat, or post a video that has unlicensed music in it. Here is why GIFs get big, how to keep them small, and how to remove the sound from a video.
In short
- Make a GIF: use video to GIF with a short range, a smaller width and a lower frame rate.
- Remove the sound: use remove audio from video to get a silent MP4 at the original picture quality.
- Cut first: if you only need part of the clip, use the video trimmer.
Every tool runs in your browser. Your video is not uploaded.
What GIF is, and why it’s big
GIF’s 89a specification was published by CompuServe in 1990. The specification itself says GIF is not intended as a platform for animation, though it can be done in a limited way.
- Limited colours: MDN explains that each GIF pixel is an index into a palette of at most 256 colours, so converting full-colour footage can produce visible dithering.
- No sound: the GIF89a specification has no audio block at all, and web.dev lists GIFs as silent.
- Large files: web.dev, from the Chrome team, gives the example of a 3.7 MB GIF that is 551 KB as MP4 and 341 KB as WebM.
Old as it is, MDN notes that animated GIFs are still widely used for short “videos”, memes and simple animations.
How big a GIF can be
| Where | Limit |
|---|---|
| X (Twitter) | Animated GIFs up to 15 MB, up to 1280×1080 and 350 frames, one GIF per post (from X’s developer documentation) |
| Discord | Users without Nitro can upload files up to 20 MB (a general file limit, not GIF-specific) |
| Slack emoji | Square images under 128 KB; GIFs can have up to 50 frames |
We found no official GIF limit for LINE or Messenger chats, so they aren’t listed.
Making a GIF that stays small
- Open video to GIF and choose a file.
- Keep the range short; the longer it is, the bigger the file.
- Lower the width: half the width at the same aspect ratio means a quarter of the pixels.
- Lower the frame rate, so fewer images are stored.
- Convert and download. If it’s still too big, reduce steps 2–4 further.
If the place you’re sending to accepts video, an MP4 is usually smaller and keeps the sound.
Removing audio from a video
Why remove it: most platforms check for music that belongs to someone else.
- YouTube says claims can be generated automatically when a video matches content in Content ID and can block a video; 1–3 minute Shorts with an active claim are blocked whatever the policy. After a claim, YouTube lets you mute just the song or all of the audio.
- Instagram says the more full-length recorded music a video contains, the more likely it is to be limited, for example muted or blocked.
- Meta’s music guidelines say content with other people’s music used without proper permission may be blocked, muted or removed, and that music may not be used commercially without the right licence.
- TikTok says you’ll get an inbox notification if a video is muted for copyright reasons.
If the sound isn’t needed, or you’ll add licensed music later, removing the original audio first avoids the problem.
How to
- Open remove audio from video and choose a file.
- Remove the audio. The tool drops the audio track and, when possible, copies the picture without re-encoding.
- Download the silent MP4.
To keep the sound separately, such as speech, the audio converter can pull the audio out of a video as its own file.
Which browsers work
Our video tools use the browser’s WebCodecs technology, so they need a recent browser such as Chrome or Edge on desktop and Android. If your browser can’t do it, the page tells you.
Note
This article is based on the GIF89a specification, MDN Web Docs, web.dev and help pages from X, Discord, Slack, YouTube, Instagram, Meta and TikTok, read on 30 September 2026. The X figures come from its developer documentation, and the web.dev article was last updated in 2018. Platforms change their rules often, so check their current help pages.
