MOV to GIF: iPhone video to GIF

Making a GIF from an iPhone video

1. Open this page in Safari on the iPhone and tap Choose a video. iOS offers your Photo Library; pick the clip.
2. iOS may say it is "preparing" the video. It is handing the file to Safari, still on the phone.
3. Trim to the moment, choose 1:1 or 4:5 if you want it to fill a feed, and keep the width around 360 px. iPhone video is tall, so a 9:16 clip at 480 px wide is 853 px tall.
4. Tap Make GIF, then long-press or tap Download; Safari saves it to Files. From Files you can share it or save it to Photos.

HEVC, "High Efficiency" and why some MOVs fail elsewhere

Since iOS 11, iPhones record in HEVC (H.265) inside a MOV container by default (Settings → Camera → Formats → High Efficiency). Safari decodes HEVC natively, and so do Chrome and Edge on most recent Macs and Windows PCs with hardware support. Firefox generally doesn't, so on Firefox a HEVC MOV takes the ffmpeg.wasm route: slower, capped at the first 60 seconds, but still entirely local. If you make GIFs from your phone often, Most Compatible records H.264, which works everywhere.

Live Photos and screen recordings

A Live Photo is a still plus a ~3-second MOV. In Photos, open it, tap Live and choose Loop or Bounce, or use Share → Save as Video, then load that video here. iPhone and macOS screen recordings (Cmd+Shift+5 on a Mac) are MOV files too and convert the same way; for UI demos pick None dithering, since flat interface colours compress best without dots.

Memory on phones

Every frame is held uncompressed while the GIF is built. A 4-second, 12 fps GIF at 480×854 is about 78 MB of raw pixels; at 1080 wide it is roughly 400 MB, which older iPhones may refuse. The size meter warns you when a setting gets heavy.