Behind Me

Making an animated background

An animated background is a GIF that plays behind you in Teams. Behind Me uses your GIF exactly as you upload it, so how it looks and how big it is are up to you. Here’s how to make one that looks real and stays small.

1. Film it

  • Film from where you sit, with your own camera, so it lines up with the room around you. On a Mac, Photo Booth records movie clips (choose the movie button at the bottom left). On Windows, use the Camera app’s video mode. Start recording, step out of view, and come back when you have enough.
  • Put the camera down on something steady. If it shakes, every pixel changes in every frame and the GIF gets enormous.
  • Film 5–10 seconds of gentle movement: light, a plant, a screen, people in the distance. Small movement looks real; big movement is distracting behind you.
  • Hold it landscape. Teams backgrounds are 16:9.
  • Keep confidential screens and whiteboards out of shot.
  • For a seamless loop, film something that ends roughly where it started, or play it forward then backward (a “boomerang”). The ffmpeg command below can do that.

2. Turn it into a GIF

Aim for:

  • 1280×720 (16:9). Smaller works too, down to 640×360.
  • 10–15 frames per second. Phones and Photo Booth record at 30; halving that halves the file and still looks smooth.
  • Under 10 MB if you can. Smaller loads faster in Teams. Uploads here are capped at 25 MB.

Free tools that do this:

ezgif.com, in your browser

Use Video to GIF to convert the clip, choosing a lower frame rate and size. Then use its crop tool to make it 16:9 and its optimiser (lossy compression) to shrink it. Your video is uploaded to ezgif’s servers, so don’t use it for anything confidential.

Gifski, on a Mac

A free app from the Mac App Store. Drag the video in, then set the dimensions, frame rate and quality slider. Everything stays on your Mac.

ffmpeg, from the command line

Free on Windows, Mac and Linux (download). This turns clip.mov into a 1280×720, 12 fps GIF, with the camera noise smoothed out:

ffmpeg -i clip.mov -vf "fps=12,hqdn3d=6:4:12:12,scale=1280:720:force_original_aspect_ratio=increase,crop=1280:720,split[a][b];[a]palettegen=stats_mode=diff[p];[b][p]paletteuse=dither=none:diff_mode=rectangle" -loop 0 background.gif

The same, playing forward then backward for a seamless loop:

ffmpeg -i clip.mov -filter_complex "fps=12,hqdn3d=6:4:12:12,scale=1280:720:force_original_aspect_ratio=increase,crop=1280:720,split[f][r];[r]reverse[r2];[f][r2]concat=n=2:v=1,split[a][b];[a]palettegen=stats_mode=diff[p];[b][p]paletteuse=dither=none:diff_mode=rectangle" -loop 0 background.gif

Still too big? Change fps=12 to fps=10, or 1280:720 to 960:540 (in both places).

3. Share it

Upload it on Share a background. It’s stored and added to Teams exactly as you made it. The “Add to Teams” command saves it with a .png extension, which is how Teams plays animated backgrounds.