Live Photo to GIF Converter

Apple's own apps can already get you part of the way. Photos on iPhone can make a Live Photo loop or bounce, and Photos on a Mac can export one as an animated GIF. This page is the better route when you want a bounce GIF straight from an iPhone, a specific second of the clip, control over the file size, or a GIF on Windows or Android.

How to convert a Live Photo to a GIF

Apple says a Live Photo records what happens 1.5 seconds before and after you take the picture, so it is a still image plus about three seconds of video. The GIF is made from the video half, so the first job is to get that video out as a file.

1. On the iPhone, open Photos, go to the Live Photos album, select the photo, tap the More button, then Save as Video. Apple describes this in How to turn a Live Photo into a video. The new clip lands in the Recently Saved album.
2. Open this page in Safari on the iPhone, or send the video to a computer. Tap the drop area above and pick the saved video, or drop a .livp file.
3. Set the start and end. The trim starts at 3 seconds, the length of a typical Live Photo, and can cover up to 6 seconds.
4. Choose Loop or Bounce, a width (320, 480, 640 pixels) and a frame rate (10, 15, 20 fps), then tap Make GIF and download the result.

Picking a Live Photo straight from the photo library may hand a web page only the still image, which has no motion to animate. Saving it as a video first avoids that, and the tool tells you when it receives a still instead of a video.

Three ways to do it without an app

None of these need a download from the App Store. Each one suits a different starting point, so pick the one that matches the device you have in hand.

On iPhone in Photos

Open the Live Photo, tap the Live Photo button near the top of the screen and choose Loop, Bounce or Long Exposure, as Apple's Live Photos guide explains. The effect plays inside Photos, and Apple's iPhone guides describe saving the motion as a video, not as a GIF. Save as Video gives you that short video, and this page can turn it into a GIF.

On a Mac in Photos

Double-click the Live Photo, click Edit, open the pop-up menu at the bottom right of the photo and choose Bounce. Click Done, then choose File, Export, Export GIF. If that option is missing, Apple suggests Export Unmodified Original to get a short video instead. The full steps are in Apple's guide to exporting a Live Photo as an animated GIF.

With the Shortcuts app

Shortcuts has a Make GIF action. Apple's introduction to Shortcuts uses it in an example that takes your latest photos and builds an animated GIF from them. Apple does not document how the action treats a Live Photo's motion, so test your shortcut on one photo before you rely on it.

Loop or bounce: picking the motion

Loop plays the clip forward and starts again. That works when the first and last moments look alike, such as a steady shot of rain. With most Live Photos the camera or the subject moves, so a plain loop jumps visibly at the seam.

Bounce plays forward and then backward, so every frame flows into the next and there is no seam to hide. The cost is length: at 15 fps a three-second clip is 45 frames, and the bounce plays 88, because the two end frames are not shown twice. The file grows by roughly the same factor.

GIF stores each frame's delay in hundredths of a second, so 15 fps is written as 70 milliseconds per frame, about 14.3 fps. If the GIF comes out too heavy, lower the width first, then drop to 10 fps. The GIF file size reducer can also squeeze a finished GIF under an exact byte limit.

Why a Live Photo video may not open in Chrome

When the camera is set to High Efficiency, an iPhone saves video as HEVC, also called H.265. Safari on iPhone and Mac decodes HEVC, but other browsers can only when the operating system and hardware provide a decoder. When the tool reads a clip, it checks what this browser can do and warns you before you start.

If a clip won't open, you have three fixes. Open this page in Safari on the iPhone or a Mac. Convert the clip to H.264 MP4 on another device. Or, for future Live Photos, go to Settings, Camera, Formats and choose Most Compatible, which Apple's HEIF and HEVC guide says records new video as H.264.

What this converter does and does not do

It reads MOV, MP4 and .livp files up to 100 MB, covers up to 6 seconds of video and captures at most 120 frames. Portrait clips stay portrait, because the rotation stored in the file is applied. Where the browser can decode the clip with WebCodecs, frames are read at exact times; otherwise the tool seeks the video frame by frame, which is slower.

It does not animate a still photo, add sound (GIF has no audio track), crop or add text. To crop the finished GIF, use the GIF cropper. For longer clips from any camera, the video to GIF converter takes up to ten seconds. For the pixel sizes an iPhone records in, see the iPhone aspect ratio guide.

Live Photo to GIF FAQ

How do I turn a Live Photo into a GIF on iPhone?

Open the Live Photo in Photos, tap the More button, then Save as Video. Open this page in Safari, tap the drop area and pick that new video from Recently Saved. Choose Bounce or Loop, set the trim and width, tap Make GIF, then download the file.

Can I convert a Live Photo to a GIF without an app?

Yes. Photos on a Mac can export a Live Photo as an animated GIF once the Bounce effect is applied, and this page does it in Safari on the iPhone with nothing to install. Photos on iPhone can make a Live Photo loop or bounce, and Apple's iPhone guides describe saving that motion as a video rather than a GIF.

What is a .livp file?

A .livp file is an archive that packs a Live Photo's still image and its short video into one file, which some export and backup tools produce. This page opens the archive inside your browser, finds the video part and makes the GIF from it. If the archive holds no video, the page says so.

Why won't my Live Photo video load?

There are three usual causes. The picker may have handed over only the still photo, so save the Live Photo as a video first. The clip may be HEVC (H.265), which some browsers on some systems can't decode; Safari on an iPhone or Mac can. Or the file is over 100 MB, which is far bigger than a Live Photo.

Can I turn a GIF back into a Live Photo?

Not in a browser. A Live Photo is a still image and a short video that the Photos app keeps together as one item, and a web page can only download ordinary files. It can't add that paired item to your photo library, so the reverse direction needs a native app.