Live Photo to GIF
Drop the video half of a Live Photo, trim it, and get back a GIF or a small video. The palette is built from your own frames, so gradients keep their shape. Nothing is uploaded.
Getting the video out of a Live Photo
A Live Photo is two files: a still and a three-second video. The motion lives in the video, and iPhone will hand it over if you ask in the right place. In Photos, open the Live Photo, tap the three dots, and choose Save as Video — a normal video lands in your library and you can drop it here. On a Mac, File then Export then Export Unmodified Original writes out both halves; the one ending in .MOV is the one you want. AirDrop does the same thing, sending both files across as a pair.
The palette is the whole job
A GIF may show 256 colours at once, and a video frame holds far more than that, so every GIF encoder is really a program for choosing which 256 to keep. Choosing them badly is what produces those muddy, banded animations. The colours here are counted across your frames first, then split by a median cut, so a clip that is mostly sky and skin spends its palette on sky and skin instead of on a fixed set of colours that suits neither.
Dithering, and when to turn it off
Dithering scatters the error between two palette colours across neighbouring pixels, which is what keeps a sunset from stepping down in visible bands. It costs file size, because scattered pixels compress worse than flat ones, and on graphics with large areas of one colour it adds noise where there was none. Leave it on for anything photographic; turn it off for screen recordings and flat artwork.
Loop or bounce
Loop restarts from the beginning, which shows a jump wherever the first and last frames differ. Bounce plays the clip forwards then backwards, so it always meets itself and never cuts — at the cost of doubling the frames and reading, unmistakably, as a bounce. Live Photos usually start and end on the same scene, so both work; movement across the frame favours bounce.
FAQ
Why is my GIF so large?
GIF has no motion compression: every frame stores its own picture. Fewer colours, a smaller size, a lower frame rate and a shorter trim all help, in roughly that order. The video export is a fraction of the size if the destination accepts one.
Can I drop the HEIC instead?
No. The still half holds one frame and no motion. The steps above get you the video half.
What format is the video export?
Whatever your browser can record — MP4 on Safari, usually WebM on Chrome and Firefox. The button says which one you will get. Recording happens in real time, so keep the tab in front while it runs.
Is my video uploaded?
No. It is decoded, sampled and encoded in this tab, and it never leaves your device.
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