MOV to GIF Converter
Turn a MOV into a GIF: an iPhone video, a QuickTime screen recording from a Mac, or any other .mov file.
- Free, no sign-up
- Runs in your browser
- Nothing uploaded or kept
Drop a video here
or choose one from your device: MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV
- Made on your device. Nothing is uploaded
- No watermark, no sign-up, no limits
- Fits a size limit, such as 10 MB, automatically
How to use it
Choose the MOV
Drop the .mov on the box, or tap Choose a video and pick it from Photos or Files.
Trim and crop
Set Start and End, and crop a screen recording down to the part that matters.
Make the GIF
Tap Make GIF, then download it or save it to your photos.
It runs in your browser, so the video is never uploaded. Portrait videos come out upright, iPhone HDR colours look natural, and you can crop out the parts of a screen recording you don't need.
Why make your GIF here
Most online GIF makers upload your video to a server, cap how long or how big it can be, and put a watermark on the result unless you pay. This one does none of that, because the GIF is made by your own browser.
- Your video never leaves your device. It is read from your disk and made into a GIF on this page. Open the Network tab in your browser's developer tools while you make one to see for yourself: no request carries your video.
- No watermark, no sign-up, no limits. No daily cap and no limit on the size of the video. A GIF can be up to 3,000 frames long, over three minutes at 15 frames a second.
- Fits a size limit for you. Choose under 2, 5, 10, 15 or 25 MB and the GIF is made to fit, keeping your frame rate and length, ready for a chat app, a forum or an email.
- Colours that don't flicker. One palette is chosen for the whole clip, and parts of the picture that stay still keep their colours from frame to frame, so the GIF looks steady and stays small.
- See it before you make it. The preview loops your selection at the GIF's speed, with the crop and caption drawn exactly as they will come out.
- Exact timing. Trim to a hundredth of a second; the GIF plays at the video's own speed (or the speed you choose) with no drift on long clips.
- Phone videos come out right. Portrait videos stay upright, iPhone HEVC and HDR video is supported where your browser decodes it, and odd sizes and shapes keep their proportions.
What is a MOV file?
MOV is Apple's QuickTime video format. iPhones save videos as MOV (inside Photos they look like any other video, and they become .mov when you AirDrop or copy them to a computer), and a Mac saves screen recordings as MOV. Inside, an iPhone MOV usually holds HEVC (H.265) video, often in HDR, and a Mac screen recording holds H.264.
Turn a Mac screen recording into a GIF
Record with Shift-Command-5 or QuickTime Player, then drop the .mov here. Crop to the window or area that matters, choose 10 or 12 frames a second, and keep the size at 640 or 800 px so the text stays readable. Choose Dithering Off for screens with flat colours: the GIF is smaller and the text sharper.
What each setting does
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Size (longest side) | 240 to 1080 px. The longest side, so a portrait phone video stays narrow. 480 px is sharp on a phone; never larger than the video. |
| Frame rate | 5 to 50 frames a second. 15 is smooth for most clips; 10 or 12 for screen recordings; 20 to 30 for fast motion. |
| Speed | A quarter speed to four times as fast. Faster speeds skip frames rather than shortening each one, so the GIF stays small. |
| Direction | Forward, Reverse (backwards) or Boomerang (forwards, then backwards, in a seamless loop). |
| Caption | Bold white text with a black outline, at the top or bottom, wrapped onto up to three lines. |
| Crop | Original, Square, Portrait 4:5 or 3:4, Story 9:16, Widescreen 16:9 or Classic 4:3. Drag the frame on the preview to place it. |
| File size | No limit, or under 2, 5, 10, 15 or 25 MB. If the GIF comes out bigger, it is made again a little smaller until it fits. |
| Colours | 255, 127, 63 or 31 colours for the whole clip. Fewer colours make a smaller file with flatter shading. |
| Compression | Light, Medium or Strong: how much part of the picture may change before it is redrawn. On 12 real phone videos, Medium came out 9 to 29% smaller than Light and Strong 21 to 48% smaller, with a little less fine detail in motion. Cartoons and screen recordings with flat colours save less. |
| Dithering | Smooth (best for video), Pattern (steadier, smaller) or Off (flat colours, smallest, best for cartoons and screen recordings). |
| Loop | Loop forever, or play once and stop on the last frame. |
How it works
Your browser opens the video file where it is and decodes only the frames the GIF needs, using the same video decoder it uses to play videos. Browsers that can't decode frame by frame step a hidden video player through the clip instead, which is slower but works with anything the browser can play.
A GIF can hold at most 256 colours, so 48 frames spread over your selection are looked at first, and the best 255 colours for the whole clip are chosen from them. Every frame is then mapped to those colours with dithering, which spreads the small differences so gradients don't band. After the first frame, only the rectangle that changed is stored, and pixels inside it that didn't change are left see-through so the frame under them shows. Frames that are exactly the same are merged into one longer frame.
A GIF stores each frame's time in hundredths of a second. The times are rounded so that they add up exactly, which is why a 15 second clip plays for 15.00 seconds rather than drifting.
How we tested it
Before release, the GIF maker was run in Chrome on Windows against two sets of videos:
- Test videos with known content, made for the job: H.264, VP8, VP9 and AV1 video in MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and MPEG-TS files; a phone video stored sideways with a rotation flag; an odd 202 × 118 size; a film-style letterbox and a pillarbox; a browser screen recording with no length written in it; a file with sound only; and a text file renamed .mp4.
- 12 real phone videos, from 0.3 to 14 seconds: iPhone HEVC MOVs at 1080 × 1920 and H.264 MP4s at 720 × 1280.
Every GIF was read back with a separate GIF reader, not the code that wrote it. Solid colour blocks came back within one level of the exact colour, a 4 second clip played for exactly 4.00 seconds, a sideways-stored video came out upright, black bars were gone from every edge, and reverse, boomerang, speed, trim, caption and play-once all did what they say. The sound-only file and the renamed text file each got a plain message instead of a broken GIF. With nothing to decode frames directly, as on some phones, every test video except the MPEG-TS one still converted through the slower route.
Not tested yet on real phones: Safari on iPhone, Chrome on Android, and Firefox. They use the same code; if something doesn't work for you, tell us which browser and what kind of video.
More free tools for videos and pictures
The same GIF maker, with help for other files: MP4 to GIF converter, Video to GIF maker and WebM to GIF converter. For photos, HEIC to JPG converts iPhone photos and WebP to JPG converts WebP and AVIF pictures, both in your browser too.
Frequently asked questions
Is my video uploaded?
No. The GIF is made inside your browser, on your own device: the video is read from your disk, turned into frames and written as a GIF without ever being sent anywhere. Nothing is stored on a server and nobody else can see it. You can check: open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab, and make a GIF; no request carries your video.
How do I convert a MOV to a GIF on a Mac?
Open this page in Safari or Chrome and drag the .mov from Finder onto it, or click Choose a video. Set the part you want, click Make GIF and then Download GIF; the GIF goes into your Downloads folder. A screen recording made with Shift-Command-5 or QuickTime Player is a MOV, so this works for those too.
Why won't my iPhone MOV open?
iPhones record in HEVC (H.265). Safari on a Mac, iPhone or iPad always decodes it. Chrome and Edge decode it on computers whose graphics chip supports it, which depends on the computer; where it can't, the page says the video is HEVC. Then open the page in Safari, or set the iPhone's Settings, Camera, Formats to Most Compatible, which records H.264.
Do iPhone HDR videos look right?
Yes. HDR video is converted to the normal colour range a GIF can show, the way your browser shows it on an ordinary screen, so it doesn't look grey or washed out.
Will a portrait video come out sideways?
No. Phones store which way up a video goes, and the GIF follows it, so a portrait video makes a portrait GIF. The size you pick is the longest side, so a portrait video at 480 px makes a 270 × 480 GIF.
How do I make a screen recording into a small GIF?
Crop to the part of the screen that matters, choose 10 or 12 frames a second (enough for a cursor and typing), and keep the size at 640 or 800 px so text stays readable. Screen recordings have large still areas, and the GIF only redraws what changes between frames, so they come out much smaller than camera video of the same size.
How do I make the GIF smaller?
Open More options and pick a file size: under 2, 5, 10, 15 or 25 MB. The GIF is made, and if it is too big it is made again a little smaller until it fits, keeping your frame rate, length and colours. Without a limit, these make it smaller: a smaller size (320 or 240 px), a lower frame rate (10 fps), a shorter part of the video, Medium or Strong compression (on real phone videos, Medium came out 9 to 29% smaller and Strong 21 to 48% smaller), or fewer colours. GIF is an old format, so a GIF is usually several times bigger than the video it came from.
Is there a watermark or a limit?
No. There is no watermark, no sign-up, no daily limit and no limit on how big the video you start from can be. A GIF can be up to 3,000 frames long, which is over three minutes at 15 frames a second. Because nothing is uploaded there is no upload wait: in our tests a 30 MB phone video opened in under a second.
Does the GIF keep a transparent background?
No. A video is read as solid pictures, so a transparent background in a WebM or MOV comes out black in the GIF.
A free tool from LetRelay: no sign-up, nothing stored on a server.