GIF or MP4: which should you use?

Two very different formats

Why GIFs are so large

GIF was made for simple graphics such as logos and diagrams. Animation was added two years later as a way to show several of those pictures in a row. It was never designed for camera footage.

Video formats get small by being clever about motion. They store one full picture, then for each following frame they describe only how blocks of that picture moved and what changed. A person waving against a still wall costs almost nothing after the first frame.

A GIF has one weak version of this: a pixel that has not changed at all can be left out. With camera footage, nearly every pixel changes slightly on every frame from noise alone, so nearly everything gets stored again. On top of that, GIF's compression was designed for flat areas of identical colour, which photographs do not have. The result is that a GIF of a few seconds is often several times larger than an MP4 of the same clip, and it looks worse because of the colour limit.

When a GIF is the right choice

• The place only accepts images. Some forums, comment boxes, documents, email clients and project pages will show a GIF and will not play a video.
• It must play without anyone pressing anything. A GIF starts on its own and loops forever, everywhere.
• The content is simple graphics. Screen recordings of an app, diagrams and pixel art have large flat areas, which GIF handles well.
• It is very short. Two or three seconds at a small size is a reasonable file.

When to use MP4

• Anything longer than a few seconds.
• Camera footage, where colour and detail matter.
• Anything with sound.
• Social and chat apps. Several of them, including X and WhatsApp, turn GIFs into video behind the scenes anyway, so starting from a video gives a better result.

If you have a long clip and only need part of it, the video trimmer cuts out a section as an MP4 without re-encoding.

Keeping a GIF small

Work through these in order. Each one roughly halves the file.

1. Shorten it. Find the two or three seconds that carry the moment.
2. Make it narrower. Going from 480 to 320 pixels wide removes more than half the pixels.
3. Lower the frame rate. Ten frames a second is enough for most reactions.
4. Choose steady footage. A clip shot on a tripod with a still background compresses far better than a handheld one, because unchanged pixels are skipped.

The video to GIF maker has a control for each of the first three, and it skips unchanged pixels automatically.