About PaintAGIF

The studio gives you the familiar drawing tools — pen, eraser, shapes, flood fill, colour picker, text and image import — on a canvas that supports multiple layers. Alongside the canvas sits a timeline of frames. Add a frame and the previous one is either copied across so you can nudge it, or shown as a faint ghost behind your new drawing so you can trace the next pose. That is onion-skinning, and it is how hand-drawn animation has always been made.

When the sequence is ready you pick a frame rate and export the whole thing as an animated GIF, an MP4 video, or a single PNG image. Frames can be held for longer than one beat, and any run of frames can be looped — loops can even nest inside other loops for cycles within cycles.

There is also a video to GIF converter: drop in an MP4 or WebM clip, trim it, choose a frame rate and width, and get a GIF back. You can also bring the clip in as editable frames and draw on top of it.

Most online GIF tools upload your file to a server, convert it there, and hand you a download link. That means your footage sits on somebody else's machine, usually with a queue and a size cap attached.

PaintAGIF does the whole job locally using the drawing and video features already built into modern browsers. Nothing you draw, import or export is ever sent anywhere. There is no account to create, no queue to wait in, and the tool keeps working on a flaky connection once the page has loaded. The trade-off is that conversion speed depends on your own hardware, which is why the video converter has sensible limits on file size and clip length.

PaintAGIF has no ads, no paid tiers, no locked tools, no export limits and no watermarks — every feature is available to everyone, and always will be. It is a small independent project, and the main running cost is the domain name.

If it has been useful and you would like to help cover that cost, you can buy me a coffee. It is entirely optional and unlocks nothing — the site works exactly the same for everyone.

Read the privacy policy for exactly what the site does and does not collect, or start with the guides.