Convert MOV to GIF
Turn the first ten seconds of a MOV into a looping GIF. MOV is what an iPhone records and what a Mac screen recording produces, which makes this conversion two quite different jobs wearing the same name — a screen recording becomes an excellent GIF, and phone footage of the real world becomes a mediocre one, for reasons worth knowing before you start.
Use this without the search next time. Prathom Workbench puts Prathom's tools in your toolbar.
Add to Chrome — freeDrop your MOV file here, or click to browse
Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- First ten seconds, 12 fps, 480 pixels wide
- Screen recordings convert exceptionally well
- Loops forever with no player required
- No watermark and no sign-up
How to use MOV to GIF
- 1
Add the MOV
Drop the file in or choose it from your computer. Trim first if the moment you want is not in the first ten seconds.
- 2
Convert
The clip becomes a looping GIF at 12 frames a second and 480 pixels wide.
- 3
Use it inline
Paste it into an issue tracker, a chat message or a document, where it plays without a player.
Two different conversions with one name
MOV is Apple's container, and it arrives from two places that could hardly be
more different: the camera on an iPhone, and the screen recorder built into
macOS. Both produce .mov files. They behave completely differently as GIFs.
A screen recording is close to the ideal input. Interfaces are flat color — toolbars, text, panels, a cursor — and a 256-color palette holds that almost exactly. The resulting GIF looks like the recording, and it plays inline in an issue tracker where an attached video would not get clicked.
Phone footage of the real world is the opposite. Faces, daylight, foliage and fabric are continuous gradients, and squeezing them into 256 colors produces visible banding and a stippled texture. The GIF is recognizable and clearly worse.
Knowing which of the two you have tells you whether to expect a good result.
How it works
The first ten seconds are used, at twelve frames a second and 480 pixels wide. That cap is deliberate: a GIF stores every frame as a full palette-indexed image with no motion compensation, so an uncapped conversion of a minute of 1080p video produces a file larger than the video it came from.
After trimming and scaling, the frames are reduced to a 256-color palette chosen for the clip. That reduction is where the visible cost lands.
Portrait video is the awkward case
Phones record portrait, and the 480-pixel cap applies to width. A portrait clip becomes 480 wide and around 850 tall, which is a much larger image than a landscape clip at the same width — roughly twice the pixels per frame.
Every one of those frames is stored in full, so a portrait GIF is substantially heavier than a landscape one of the same length. If the file feels too big, that is usually why, and trimming to three or four seconds is the effective fix.
There is no sound, and there never was
GIF was specified in 1987 for still images. Animation arrived as an extension and audio never did. This surprises people every time, because the format is used constantly for things that look like short videos.
If the clip needs sound, a short MP4 is the right answer — it is smaller than the GIF, in full color, and every modern chat client and browser plays it inline.
Examples
A Mac screen recording of a UI bug
The best case for GIF there is. Interface colors fit inside 256 easily, so the result looks essentially identical to the recording.
A short clip filmed on a phone
Real-world footage is the harder case. Skin, fur and daylight need far more than 256 colors, and the GIF will show it.
Frequently asked questions
Why do screen recordings look so much better as GIFs than videos of real life?
Because of the 256-color limit. An interface is mostly flat areas of a few colors, which fits inside a small palette almost perfectly. A photograph of the world is continuous gradient — skin, sky, shadow — and reducing that to 256 colors forces approximation, which appears as banding and speckling. Same conversion, very different results.
My phone video is portrait — what happens to it?
It stays portrait. The 480-pixel limit applies to the width, so a portrait clip becomes 480 wide and taller than it is wide, which is correct but produces a physically larger image than a landscape clip at the same setting. That means a bigger file, so portrait video is where the ten-second cap bites hardest.
Can I keep the sound?
No, and not because of a setting — GIF has no audio track at all. The format was designed for still images in 1987 and animation was bolted on later; sound was never part of it. If the audio matters, a short MP4 is the answer, or extract the audio separately as an MP3.
Why is the GIF larger than the MOV it came from?
Because GIF stores every frame in full, while video codecs store one frame and then only what changed between it and the next. For footage with a lot of movement, that difference is enormous. It is the single most surprising thing about the format and the reason the ten-second cap exists.
Further reading
- The Same Clip Was Four Times Bigger as a GIF, at Fewer FramesConverting a video to a GIF feels like a downgrade, so the file should get smaller. It gets much bigger. The clip we measured quadrupled while losing four frames in every ten, and the reason is that a GIF has no idea what a video codec knows.
- GIF Transparency Has Exactly One Bit, and It Shows on Every EdgeA PNG can record a pixel as 37% transparent. A GIF cannot — each pixel is either fully visible or fully invisible, and there is nothing in between. On a shape with a soft anti-aliased edge, that difference is measurable, and it is why a logo saved as GIF gets a jagged fringe that no amount of care in the original file prevents.