The Best Ways to Make Your Own GIFs

GIFs have been around since way back in 1987, but show no signs of disappearing. They continue to be a popular way of sharing short videos in just about any app, on just about any platform. Whether you want to express hope, fear, happiness, sadness, or any other emotion, there is a GIF that perfectly encapsulates your feelings.

But maybe you don’t want to use a GIF someone else has made. Maybe you want to create your own. Perhaps you’ve found the perfect snippet of video to express your thoughts in a second or two, and you need it in the GIF format. In that case, you can make your own GIF, often in just a few minutes.

The best way of making a GIF depends on what you’re creating it out of, whether that’s a YouTube video or a series of your own photos. I’ll run down the most important options, and how to work through them.

Creating a GIF from images: Google Photos

If you have all the frames of your GIF ready as separate images, you can build the GIF in Google Photos. Maybe you’ve got several shots of your pet, for example, and you want to turn them into a GIF.

First, select all the images you want to use, in order. On mobile, long press on the picture you want to start on (to enable the multi-select mode), then tap on the subsequent images. On the web, click the check marks by each image. Then, select the + (plus) button, then pick Animation. After a few seconds, your GIF is created, and added to your Google Photos library.

Motion Photos can be made straight into GIFs. Credit: Lifehacker

If you’ve got a relatively new Pixel phone, you should be able to take Motion Photos, where every time you snap a photo, a short video clip is saved as well. Google explains them here, and you can enable or disable them from the Camera app settings.

Motion Photos make creating GIFs even easier, though you need to use the mobile app—you can’t do it on the web. Select the photo to open it full screen, then tap the three dots (top right), then choose Export. The next dialog box you see has GIF as an option, and the resulting file is then saved in your Google Photos library.

Creating a GIF from images or videos: Apple Photos

Pixel phones have Motion Photos, and iPhones have Live Photos, and the idea is the same: Several frames are saved rather than a single image, every time you tap the shutter button. Apple explains here how Live Photos work and how to turn them on.

You can turn Live Photos into GIFs directly, but you need to use Photos on macOS—you can’t do this from Photos on iOS. Double-click on an image to open it, then choose File, Export, and Export GIF. You’ll be asked to choose a folder location and a filename.

Use Shortcuts to make GIFs on an iPhone. Credit: Lifehacker

If you want to use your iPhone, Apple’s own Shortcuts app can be used in combination with Photos. If you open the Gallery tab and search for “GIF”, you’ll see options for turning static photos, Live Photos, and videos into GIFs, right from your phone. To add a shortcut, just tap the + (plus) icon on it.

All these shortcuts run in similar ways, and will ask you to choose a file (or several files) from your phone to turn into a GIF. Most of the rest of the hard work is done for you, and you get a GIF added to your Photos library at the end of it. In the case of converting videos, you’ll be able to trim the clip to the right start and end points first.

Creating a GIF from an online video: Giphy

A lot of the time you’re going to want to create a GIF out of an online video you’ve found on a service like YouTube or Vimeo. Perhaps the most straightforward tool for the job here is Giphy on the web. It lets you trim videos to a certain length, add extras like text and stickers, and post GIFs to the web to share, or download them.

You do need to register an account in order to use Giphy, but it’s free. When that’s done, just point the web app towards the URL of the video you want to make a GIF from (you can also upload images or video files from your computer, if you prefer): After a few minutes processing you’ll get to the edit and create screen, where you can choose the exact frames you want to use to create your GIF.

Giphy offers a simple-to-use web app for GIF making. Credit: Lifehacker

Unfortunately, Giphy and the other online tools you’ll come across aren’t able to grab content from streaming services like Netflix or Prime Video. Sadly, it’s rather difficult to grab content from these services, unless you use illegal means to get local copies of the videos you need.

Most streaming services will automatically disable playback when they detect that any kind of screen capture tool is being used, either on Windows or macOS, which makes it difficult to make your own GIFs. The same tech that’s designed to stop content being pirted wholesale also stops you from extracting snippets of it.

Creating a GIF from images or videos: desktop tools

If you’re using a Windows or macOS computer to make your GIF, then you’ve got a few options available: Adobe Photoshop can create GIFs for example, using the layers in an image as the individual frames. With a layered image open, choose Window and Timeline, then choose Create Frame Animation in the Timeline pane.

Click the three horizontal lines (top right in the pane), then Make Frames From Layers to see the individual frames—these can all be edited and tweaked as required. Finally, choose File, Export, and Save for Web (Legacy) to output the GIF. To convert a video file in the same way, pick File, Import, and Video Frames to Layers, then open up the Timeline pane to see your frames.

The Timeline window is where GIFs are built in Photoshop. Credit: Lifehacker

A simpler option that you don’t have to pay for is the venerable Ezgif web app, which can do just about anything you need that’s GIF-related (except rip content from Netflix or another streaming service). Choose GIF Maker to build a GIF from images, or Video to GIF to create a GIF from a video file, then follow the instructions on screen.

Ezgif can resize, rotate, and crop GIFs as you go, as well as optimize them by reducing their size. You don’t want a huge GIF that takes an age to load, and Ezgif can cut down file sizes by quickly removing frames, reducing the number of colors, compressing the image quality, and more besides.