The old GIF format will not disappear in the short term. With the birth of social networks and memes, the three-decade-old format for light animation, without loops and without sound, has found a new opportunity in life.
There are better formats to capture animations, but none so widely supported. You do not need sophisticated editing software on your PC or Mac to make a GIF. All you need is your iPhone. While there are many ways to make a GIF with your iPhone, these three should cover most of your needs.
Save Live Photos as GIFs
The live photos capture a couple of seconds of animation on each side of the image you take. Keep pressed on them, and you can see them animated. To capture Live Photos, press the concentric circles at the top of the camera application.
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You can convert them to GIF using the Photos application that came pre-installed on your iPhone.
Open the Photos application and find the live photo you want to convert into a GIF. You can easily find them by selecting Albums at the bottom of the application, scrolling down to the list of Media Types. Live Photos will be one of the selections.
You can easily find all your photos live by browsing your albums. Once you have selected your live photo, drag it up.
You will see a list of Effects, a map that shows where the photo was taken and categories of related images. Select the Loop or Bounce animation.
Drag your photo up, select Loop or Bounce, and share. It’s that easy. That’s all you need to do! If you open the Share menu to send the GIF in an email or use it in a Tweet, it will be sent as a GIF. Back on the Albums screen, under the Media Types heading, you will see Animated as one of the options. You can find all the live photos that you have turned into GIFs there.
Use a shortcut to create GIF files from videos or burst photos
If you hold down the shutter button on the camera application of your iPhone, it will take a very rapid succession of still images at full resolution. It is not as smooth as a live photo, but the images have a much higher quality and you can keep shooting for several seconds.
There is no built-in way to convert a burst shot into a GIF, but you can easily do so with the Shortcuts application:
- Make sure you have the shortcuts application.
- Download this Convert Burst to GIFshortcut.
- Execute the shortcut. A list of all your burst photos will be displayed. Select one and wait a few seconds while it becomes a GIF.
- Select Donate and you will be asked to share the GIF or Save in photos.
To convert photos or videos from bursts to GIF, all you need is the Shortcuts application (which you should probably have, anyway).
Do you want to do the same with a video instead of a burst photo? Try this:
- Take this video to GIFshortcut.
- Execute it. You will be presented with a list of qualified videos (more than one second long and not a live photo).
- Video too long? No problem: an edit window will open to allow you to cut it to the part of the one you want to make a GIF.
- Press Save. Then press the share button at the top of the screen to save the image or send it to a social networking application, email, message or other service.
Use an app like Giphy
Of course, there are other ways to make GIFs. Dedicated GIF applications allow you to record new videos, add stickers, text and AR effects, and more.
One of our favorites is the Giphy. It allows you to browse and share from the huge GIF file library on the site, extract images or videos from your phone’s photo library or record and edit new videos. Giphy used to have a separate application for all the things that make GIF (Giphy Cam), but it has not been updated since 2017. Since then, all of its features have been incorporated into Giphy’s main application.
