Convert a MOV to an animated GIF on iPhone
GIF is a 35-year-old image format doing an impression of a video. For a short, silent, looping clip it is still the only thing that works everywhere. For anything else it is the wrong tool, and it is worth knowing why before you convert.
What GIF actually is
GIF is not a video format. It is an image format from 1987 that happens to support multiple frames. Everything painful about it follows from that:
- 256 colours, maximum. Each frame is drawn from an 8-bit palette. Your MOV has millions of colours; the GIF gets 256 of them. Skin tones, skies, gradients and shadows are where you will see it — as banding, or as a faint dithering texture that was not in the original.
- No audio. At all. There is no audio track in the GIF specification. If your clip has someone speaking, converting it to GIF silences them permanently.
- No modern compression. GIF uses LZW, which was designed for flat-coloured logos, not for moving photographic footage. It is astonishingly inefficient at exactly the thing you are asking it to do.
The result is a file that looks worse than your video and is very frequently larger than it. That is not a flaw in the converter. That is GIF.
Convexy caps GIF output at the first 15 seconds. If your MOV is longer, the GIF will contain the first 15 seconds and stop. This is a hard limit, not a setting — a longer GIF at any usable frame rate produces a file so large that nothing you would want to send it to will accept it. If the moment you want is later in the clip, trim the video in the Photos app first, then convert the trimmed copy.
When GIF is genuinely the right answer
It has one real advantage, and it is a big one: a GIF autoplays and loops silently, inline, everywhere, with no player. Chat apps, forums, wikis, bug trackers, README files, ancient CMSes, email clients. Nothing has to be clicked. Nothing asks for permission.
So GIF is correct for:
- A short UI demonstration or bug reproduction — a few seconds of a screen recording, in a ticket.
- A silent reaction clip for a chat app or forum that will not embed video.
- A tiny looping animation on a page or in a README.
It is the wrong answer for a clip with speech, a clip longer than a few seconds, anything with rich colour or gradients, and anything going somewhere that can simply play an MP4. In that last case — which is most cases — just send the MP4. It will be smaller, sharper and it will have sound.
The settings that decide your file size
GIF size scales with frames × pixels, brutally and directly. There is no clever bitrate to hide behind. Convexy exposes the three dials that matter:
- Frame rate — 10, 15 or 20 fps. Start at 10. It looks fine for most footage and produces half the frames of 20 fps. This is the single most effective size control you have.
- Max width — 240 to 1080 px (480 by default). Halving the width quarters the pixel count of every frame. This is the second most effective control, and 480 px is plenty for a chat window or a bug report.
- Loop — infinite, once, or three times. No effect on size; it just controls the behaviour.
A 10-second clip at 480 px and 10 fps is 100 frames of 8-bit image data. Depending on how much movement there is, that commonly lands anywhere from a couple of megabytes to well over ten. Busy, moving, detailed footage is the worst case; a mostly-static screen recording is the best.
How to get a GIF you are not embarrassed by
Work with the format's grain instead of against it:
- Keep it short. Three to six seconds. The 15-second cap is a ceiling, not a target.
- Prefer flat, simple content. Screen recordings, graphics and text convert beautifully — they were what the 256-colour palette was designed for. Faces, skies and firelight do not.
- Go smaller than you think. 480 px wide is usually more than enough. Try 320.
- Start at 10 fps and only raise it if the motion genuinely judders.
How to do it
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Bring the MOV into Convexy
Tap Browse files to pick it from Files, choose it from Photos, or share it in from another app.
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Choose animated GIF
Convexy offers only what the file can genuinely become — GIF appears alongside MP4, M4V, extracted audio and still frames.
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Set frame rate and width
Start with 10 fps and 480 px. These two settings control your file size more than anything else you can do.
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Choose the loop behaviour
Infinite is the default and what most people expect from a GIF. Once or three times are there if you want the loop to stop.
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Convert, then save or share
Only the first 15 seconds are used. The GIF is built on your device; save it to Files or Photos, or share it straight on.
Common questions
Why is my GIF bigger than the video it came from?
Because GIF has no real video compression. It stores each frame as an 8-bit image with LZW compression — a scheme designed in the 1980s for flat-coloured graphics. Modern video codecs like H.264 store only what changed between frames and do it far more cleverly. A GIF being several times the size of the MP4 it came from is completely normal and entirely GIF's fault.
Why does my GIF look grainy or banded?
The 256-colour limit. Every frame has to be reduced to an 8-bit palette, and photographic footage — faces, skies, gradients, shadows — simply has more colours than that. The banding and dithering you are seeing is the palette reduction, not a bug in the conversion. Graphics and screen recordings survive it far better than camera footage does.
Can I make a GIF longer than 15 seconds?
Not in Convexy — the cap is hard. It exists because a longer GIF at any usable frame rate and width produces a file so large that most places you would want to send it will refuse it. If you need a different section of the video, trim it in the Photos app first and convert the trimmed copy.
Does the GIF keep the sound?
No, and no GIF ever has. The format has no audio track — there is nowhere to put it. If the audio matters, GIF is the wrong format entirely and you should send the video, or extract the audio to M4A separately.
Should I be using a GIF at all?
Only if the destination cannot play video inline. That is the format's one genuine advantage: it autoplays and loops anywhere, with no player and no click. If the place you are sending it will happily embed an MP4, send the MP4 — it will be smaller, sharper, longer, and it will have sound.