Cinemagraph Maker

A cinemagraph is a contradiction the eye loves: a photograph that breathes in one place. The technique is simple — one frozen frame, one region where the video keeps playing — but the illusion only holds when the two layers agree with each other. That means a static camera. On a tripod shot, the frozen background and the moving region share the same geometry, so steam rising from a cup reads as magic. On a handheld shot, every frame sits a few pixels away from the last, and the frozen layer fights the moving layer into visible double edges — the "ghosting" that ruins the effect. Shoot it still, or prop the phone and don't touch it.

The second ingredient is choosing the right motion. The best cinemagraph motion is small, repetitive and self-similar: a candle flame, hair in the wind, water rippling, a flag. Big directional motion (someone walking across the frame) breaks the loop because the end of the clip doesn't match the beginning — the subject jumps back to the start visibly. Keep clips short, ideally 3–8 seconds, and mask a region where the motion looks roughly the same at the start and the end of the loop. That is also why painting a tight mask matters: every extra painted pixel is a place where the loop seam can show.

A note on honesty about this tool. Mobile apps like Pixaloop will make cinemagraphs for you, but the free tiers stamp watermarks or lock export behind subscriptions — there is no free browser tool that does this, which is why this page exists. The trade-offs here: the working resolution is capped at 1280 px wide so the live compositing stays smooth, the export is a silent WebM (cinemagraphs are silent by convention, and looping audio would glitch at the seam anyway), and exports run in real time — a 10-second clip takes 10 seconds to record. If you need a GIF for a platform that won't take WebM, feed the export into our Video to GIF Maker. Our guide to converting video to GIF covers the frame rate, width and clip length that keep the file small enough to post.