ChatGPT Images 2.6 makes GIFs now. Your website may pay for it.

On 4 November, OpenAI gave ChatGPT a new trick. Type a sentence or upload a photo and it hands you back a looping GIF. No animator, no editing software, no waiting until Thursday for someone to fit you in.

So at some point soon, someone in your business will want one on the homepage.

Before they do, look at this. We took one image from a client’s website, gave it four seconds of slow movement and saved it as a GIF. The file came out at 16.6 MB. The same clip saved as an MP4 is 196 KB. They look almost the same. The MP4 is even smaller than the still image we started with.

The new tool is good news. It just needs one extra step between ChatGPT and your website, and that step is what most of the launch coverage leaves out.

What’s new in ChatGPT Images 2.6

Two changes matter if you run a business. A third matters if you employ developers.

GIFs from a prompt or a photo

You can turn a text prompt or an uploaded photo into a looping GIF inside ChatGPT, then adjust the speed, edit individual frames and share the result. That last part is the real change. Until now, getting a GIF out of ChatGPT usually meant generating frames one at a time and stitching them together afterwards.

Saved reference images

You can save and tag images of people, pets and characters, then use them again without re-uploading. It’s the quieter feature, and it may turn out to be the more useful one. If your brand has a mascot, it’s now a tag away in every future chat.

Two new API models

GPT-Image-2.6 Flare is the fast one, producing images in as little as six seconds at low quality. GPT-Image-2.6 Sunburst aims for higher quality and more consistent edits at medium and high settings. OpenAI’s launch post ties its “50% faster” claim to these API models. Some coverage applies that figure to ChatGPT itself, and none of it says what the comparison is against, so treat the number loosely.

OpenAI says Images 2.6 is available in ChatGPT and Codex across all tiers, on web, desktop and mobile. It also reports more than 4 billion images a week, up from 3 billion eight weeks earlier. At that pace, an animated image won’t feel special for long. The ones that work will be the ones that show something useful.

What we still don’t know

We couldn’t find published figures for maximum frames, length, resolution, file size or per-plan limits. Nothing we read confirms GIF output through the API either. If you see exact numbers quoted this week, check where they came from.

How to make a GIF in ChatGPT

The steps below follow the announced features and one early guide, and the advice in them is ours. Screens may change while the rollout continues.

1. 01

   Open a new chat

   If GIF output isn’t showing, update the app or refresh the page. One early guide reports the rollout is staged, so your account may get it later than a colleague’s.

2. 02

   Describe one movement

   Steam rises. A door opens. A needle ticks up. Good loops do one thing, and every extra movement is something else that can go wrong across every frame.

3. 03

   Say how it should loop

   Ask for the last frame to flow back into the first. A visible jump at the loop point is the quickest way to make a GIF look cheap.

4. 04

   Protect what mustn’t change

   Working from a photo? Say what moves, then tell it to keep the composition, colours and text exactly as they are. Otherwise you’re leaving your brand to chance.

5. 05

   Set the speed

   Try slower than feels natural. On a business site, calm movement tends to feel confident. Fast movement tends to feel like an advert.

6. 06

   Fix single frames

   Go through it frame by frame. If one is off, ask ChatGPT to redraw that frame instead of starting again. Look hardest at small text, hands and logos.

7. 07

   Check the file size

   Do this before you send it to anyone. It decides everything that happens next.

Two prompts to start from

Both use the same pattern: one subject, one movement, everything else held still, then the loop.

From a description

Create a looping GIF of a ceramic coffee cup on an oak table. Steam rises slowly from the cup. Nothing else moves. Soft morning light, plain cream background. Seamless loop: the last frame flows back into the first.

From your own photo

Animate this product photo as a looping GIF. Only the ribbon moves, gently, as if in a light breeze. Keep the composition, colours and all text exactly as they are. No zoom. Seamless loop.

The test: one clip, four file formats

We exported the same four-second loop in each format. All four are 800 by 450 pixels and 60 frames long.

That’s not a typing error. The GIF is about 85 times the size of the MP4 and 187 times the size of the WebM. On a 10 Mbps connection, 16.6 MB takes around 13 seconds to arrive. The MP4 takes under a quarter of a second.

Why the gap is so big

GIF is a format from the 1980s. Each pixel points to a palette of at most 256 colours, and it has none of the compression modern video uses. Video can store what changes between frames. A GIF of a moving photo has to keep redrawing most of the picture.

Did we rig it?

A little, without meaning to. A slow zoom across a detailed photo is close to the worst case for GIF, because almost every pixel changes in every frame. So we gave GIF two better chances.

We expected the flat graphic to close the gap. It didn’t. For an independent figure, Google’s web.dev guide gives an example of a 3.7 MB GIF becoming a 551 KB MP4 and a 341 KB WebM, a smaller gap than ours but the same direction. Your result will depend on the clip, and ChatGPT may well export lighter GIFs than our test file. Check the file size before you assume either way.

Method: tested on 5 November 2026 with FFmpeg 9.0.2. Source was a 253 KB WebP. 4 seconds, 15 frames per second. GIF used an optimised palette with dithering. MP4 (CRF 25) and WebM (CRF 41) used web.dev’s published settings. Animated WebP used quality 75. Measured similarity to the original (SSIM, where 1 means identical): GIF 0.968, MP4 0.961, WebM 0.973, animated WebP 0.949.

Where a GIF is fine, and where it isn’t

You don’t need to give up GIFs. You only need to know where they’re doing you harm.

Slack, Teams, group chats

Keep the GIF. It’s what these apps are good at, and nobody is waiting on your page speed.

Email

Keep the GIF, but small. Video doesn’t work reliably in email, so a GIF is still the practical choice. Make the first frame work on its own, with the offer readable, in case the animation never plays.

Your website

Convert to video. This is where file size costs you. Use MP4 and WebM, as shown below.

Social posts and ads

Upload as video. Where a platform accepts video, that’s normally the better upload. Check its current specs first.

On email, one warning. Can I Email lists Outlook for Windows 2007 to 2019 as not supporting animated GIFs. That data was last tested in 2020, so send yourself a test before a big campaign.

How to put it on your website

If you have a developer, send them this section. It’s a short job. These are the commands from web.dev, which turn the GIF into an MP4 and a WebM using FFmpeg.

ffmpeg -i my-animation.gif -b:v 0 -crf 25 -f mp4 -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p my-animation.mp4
ffmpeg -i my-animation.gif -c vp9 -b:v 0 -crf 41 my-animation.webm

The MP4 command needs even pixel dimensions, and web.dev gives a cropping variation if your GIF has odd ones. Then swap the image for a video tag that behaves like a GIF:

<video autoplay loop muted playsinline width="800" height="450">
  <source src="my-animation.webm" type="video/webm">
  <source src="my-animation.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

muted and playsinline matter, because they let it autoplay in place, as a GIF would. The width and height reserve the space, so the page doesn’t jump when the clip loads. And if the clip sits far down the page, load it only as the visitor gets there, as the one above does.

Moving images come with rules

These apply however you made the animation. They matter more when you didn’t direct every frame yourself.

Give people a way to stop it

Under WCAG 2.2.2, anything that starts by itself, runs for more than five seconds and sits alongside other content needs a way to pause, stop or hide it. So a looping GIF on a page needs a control, or it has to stop within five seconds. This is Level A, the most basic level of the standard. It’s also why the clip above has a pause button.

Watch for flashing

WCAG 2.3.1 limits flashing to three times in any one second, unless it falls below set thresholds. W3C says short looped clips such as GIFs should be judged while looping, so watch yours go round a few times. Rapid flashing can trigger seizures, so if your GIF flickers or strobes, regenerate it.

Respect the reduced motion setting

Visitors can ask their device to minimise non-essential motion, and your site can read that through prefers-reduced-motion. MDN warns that scaling or panning large objects can trigger vestibular problems, which is exactly what an animated hero image tends to do. If someone has that setting on, our clip stays still.