GIF & Audio Tools
Build, edit, compress, and re-time GIFs and audio clips entirely client-side.
Animated GIFs are a strange format — they predate the modern web (1987!) and somehow refuse to die. They're uncompressed by modern standards, capped at 256 colors per frame, and not particularly efficient compared to short MP4s. But they autoplay everywhere, work in places video doesn't (email, GitHub README, chat threads), and they're instantly understood. The tools on this page cover the everyday GIF operations that should not require installing a video editor — plus a small audio trimmer for the moments you need to clip a sound file in the same workflow.
Under the hood, every GIF tool here decodes the animated GIF frame-by-frame using a small JavaScript library (gifuct-js), runs your edit on each frame, and re-encodes the result with gifenc — a fast WebAssembly encoder. Audio runs through the Web Audio API and a hand-rolled WAV serializer, so MP3 and WAV trims work without any server. As with the rest of the site, nothing is uploaded; the file is read into memory, edited, and written back out.
A few details worth knowing about GIFs specifically. Every GIF frame is a full image, but most encoders only store the difference from the previous frame to save space — a process called “disposal.” When you edit frames (adding text, changing speed), the tool may need to decode disposals correctly to get the right starting point for each frame. If a tool's output has visual glitches, it's almost always a disposal-handling issue with an unusual input GIF, and re-saving the source through Compress GIF first usually fixes it.
All gif & audio (7)
GIF Frame Extractor
Pull individual frames out of an animated GIF.
GIF Speed Changer
Re-time animated GIFs from 0.25× to 5×.
Add Text to GIF
Bake captions onto every frame of an animated GIF.
Compress GIF
Shrink GIF file size while keeping the animation.
APNG to GIF
Convert animated PNG (APNG) into a standard GIF.
Images to GIF
Combine multiple images into an animated GIF.
Audio Trimmer
Trim MP3, WAV, and other audio clips in the browser.
Common GIF and audio workflows
Build a GIF from a photo sequence. Images to GIF takes a list of images, lets you set frame delay, and outputs a single animated GIF. Use this for stop-motion, slow-fade transitions, or short slideshow loops. If you want each image to hold for a different time, upload them in the order you want and adjust per-frame timing on the page.
Make a long GIF play faster (or slower). GIF Speed Changer retimes from 0.25× to 5×. Slowing a fast GIF down (0.5× or slower) is the best way to examine each frame; speeding it up is useful for compressing dramatic action into a punchier loop. Speed changes are lossless — they only modify the per-frame delay, not the pixels.
Add captions to a reaction GIF. Add Text to GIF bakes text directly into every frame with full font and color control. The text is permanent once baked (you can't remove or edit it later without re-creating the GIF), so save your source GIF first if you might want different captions later.
Shrink a GIF for upload. Compress GIF trims palette size, drops duplicate frames, and re-encodes — typically halving the file size with little visible difference. If that's not enough, take individual frames out with GIF Frame Extractor, drop the slowest-changing ones, and rebuild with Images to GIF.
Convert animated PNG to GIF. APNG to GIF handles the case where you have an animated PNG (which most chat apps and email clients still don't support) and need to convert it to GIF. The conversion drops APNG's 24-bit color depth down to GIF's 256-color palette, which can shift some colors — preview before committing.
Trim an audio file. Audio Trimmer handles MP3, WAV, OGG, and any format the browser's Web Audio API can decode. Drop the file, set start and end markers, save. Useful for quickly cutting podcast snippets, voice memos, or ringtones.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my GIF so much bigger than a video of the same thing?▾
GIF compression is decades old and limited to 256 colors per frame. A short MP4 of the same content is typically 10-20× smaller. If the destination accepts video (Twitter, Reddit, Slack), MP4 or WebM is almost always a better choice. GIF makes sense for places that don't play video — email, GitHub README, chat threads — and for short looping animations.
What's the maximum GIF size?▾
There's no fixed limit, but very long or very large-frame GIFs push memory hard since every frame is decoded into a pixel buffer. As a rough rule, 500 frames at 800px wide is comfortable on a laptop. If you hit a slowdown, downscale the GIF first or split it into shorter pieces.
Will adding text to a GIF affect quality?▾
The text itself is rendered cleanly, but every modification triggers a re-encode of every frame. GIF's 256-color palette means colors shift slightly on re-encode. If you compare the original and edited GIF closely, you may see subtle banding in gradients — that's the palette quantization, not the text rendering.
Can I edit a single frame of a GIF?▾
Pull out individual frames with /gif-frame-extractor (each becomes a PNG), edit the PNG with the image-editing tools, then rebuild the GIF with /images-to-gif. There's no in-place single-frame editor — the round-trip approach is more flexible anyway.
Does the audio trimmer support MP3, WAV, OGG, M4A?▾
It supports anything the browser's Web Audio API can decode, which is MP3, WAV, OGG, and (on most browsers) M4A/AAC. The output is WAV — if you need a smaller MP3, run the WAV through a separate MP3 encoder.
Will trimming audio lose quality?▾
The output is a lossless WAV at the original sample rate, so the trim itself adds no quality loss. The only loss happens if your source was already lossy (like MP3) — the WAV is a pristine copy of those lossy samples, but no better than the input.