How to Convert MP4 to GIF on Mac

You can't convert an MP4 to a GIF on a Mac with QuickTime Player or Preview. We've looked in every menu, more than once, usually ten minutes before a pitch. The good news is that the free options are excellent. For the best looking GIF with no typing, use Gifski. If you're on a borrowed Mac and can't install anything, our browser converter does it without uploading the file. Shortcuts and Keynote both make GIFs with nothing extra installed, and ffmpeg does it in one command when you want the same settings every time.

We make GIFs on Macs most weeks at Perspective Pictures, mainly for treatments and pitch decks, so this is the order we reach for things in. Everything below works the same for MOV files, iPhone footage and screen recordings. On a PC? There's a Windows version too.

Pick a method in ten seconds

Method	Cost (as of October 2026)	Quality	Control	Best for
Spark browser converter	Free, no sign-up	Very good	Width, fps, quality, speed, frame-accurate trim	One-offs, nothing to install
Gifski	Free on the Mac App Store	Excellent	Width, fps, quality, loop	The best looking GIF with no typing
Shortcuts (Make GIF)	Free, built into macOS	Basic	Very little	A right-click GIF for a colleague
Keynote	Free with every Mac	OK	Resolution, frame rate	A caption or logo over the clip
FFmpeg	Free, open source	Excellent	Everything	Batches and repeat jobs
Spark desktop app	Free for 15 videos; GIF export on paid plans from £16 a month	Very good	In and out points, 8 to 24 fps, 320 to 1080 px	GIFs from references you've saved

If you only remember one line: Gifski for anything a client sees, the browser tool when it isn't your Mac.

First, trim it in QuickTime

Every second you cut is file size you don't pay for later. Open the clip in QuickTime Player, press Command T (or Edit > Trim), drag the yellow handles round the moment and click Trim. File > Save keeps the short copy.

How short? Three to six seconds for a deck or a Slack message. Our own house rule is one camera move, start to finish, and nothing either side of it. The loop below is two seconds of Nike ACG's Change of pace, and two seconds is enough to sell the whole idea of the film.

1. The free browser converter

Drop the video onto the converter on this site in Safari or Chrome. It runs inside the browser on your Mac, so the file never leaves the machine. That matters when it's an unreleased cut and the edit suite has a strict NDA.

Pick up to 30 seconds on the timeline and nudge the in and out points frame by frame with the comma and full stop keys. Then choose a width (480 px is a sensible start), a frame rate (12 or 15 fps), and Small, Balanced or Best quality. You see an estimated file size before you convert, and there's no watermark. Keep the tab in front while it works, because Safari throttles tabs it thinks you've forgotten about.

2. Gifski, the best free Mac app for it

Gifski is a free app by Sindre Sorhus, built on the gifski encoder, and it makes some of the cleanest GIFs of anything on this list. It builds palettes across frames and dithers in time as well as space, which is why a dusk sky comes out smooth instead of striped.

1. 1Install it from the Mac App Store. The current version asks for macOS 26; the GitHub page keeps older builds for older Macs.
2. 2Drag your MP4 or MOV into the window.
3. 3Set the width (start at 480 px), the frame rate (12 to 15) and the quality slider. You can trim and crop here too.
4. 4Leave Loop on. Skip Bounce unless you want the yo-yo effect, because it doubles the frames and the file.
5. 5Click Convert, then Save.

The quality slider is the one to play with. Two notches down usually saves a third of the file with no difference anyone will spot on a laptop.

3. Shortcuts: a right-click GIF maker

The Shortcuts app has a Make GIF action that takes a video. It's the only fully built-in route, and you can wire it into Finder.

1. 1Open Shortcuts and click +.
2. 2Search the actions panel for Make GIF and drag it in.
3. 3Add Save File underneath, so it asks where to save.
4. 4Open the details panel (the i button), tick Use as Quick Action and Finder, and call it "Make GIF".
5. 5In Finder, right-click a video and choose Quick Actions > Make GIF.

Control is close to zero. You get loop and auto-size toggles and that's it, so there's nothing you can do about the size. Lovely for a screen recording you're sending to a colleague. Not what we'd put in front of a client.

4. Keynote, the one everyone forgets

Keynote has exported animated GIFs for years. Reach for it when the clip needs a caption, a logo or a title card on top.

1. 1New presentation. In the Document sidebar, set the slide size to match the video (1920 x 1080 for most widescreen footage).
2. 2Drag the video on and stretch it to fill. To trim, select it and use Edit Movie in the Format sidebar's Movie tab.
3. 3Add your text.
4. 4File > Export To > Animated GIF, pick a resolution and frame rate, click Next.

No palette or dither settings, so test it on the real footage. Skies are the giveaway.

If the GIF is heading back into a deck anyway, our guide to making a moodboard in Keynote covers how Keynote plays GIFs and movies once they're on the slide.

5. ffmpeg: one command, total control

ffmpeg is the free command-line tool most video software is quietly built on. It's what we use when we're making a dozen GIFs at the same size for a treatment and want them to match. Install Homebrew if you haven't, then in Terminal:

brew install ffmpeg

From the folder your video is in:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "fps=15,scale=480:-1:flags=lanczos,split[a][b];[a]palettegen=stats_mode=diff[p];[b][p]paletteuse=dither=bayer:bayer_scale=3" output.gif

That builds a palette from your clip first and then encodes with it. People call it the two-pass method, and it's the difference between a clean GIF and a speckled one:

To take part of the video, put -ss 12 -t 4 before -i: 4 seconds, starting at 12. We ran this exact recipe on a 4-second clip of our own launch film. 1.85 MB at 480 px with Bayer dithering, against 3.44 MB with the smoother Sierra dither. On a slide you'd struggle to tell them apart, so we use Bayer. The full table is in our guide to making GIFs without losing quality.

Every MP4 in a folder, in one go:

for f in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -vf "fps=15,scale=480:-1:flags=lanczos,split[a][b];[a]palettegen=stats_mode=diff[p];[b][p]paletteuse=dither=bayer:bayer_scale=3" "${f%.mp4}.gif"; done

Gifski has a command-line version too, and Homebrew's build reads video directly:

brew install gifski
gifski --fps 15 --width 480 -o output.gif input.mp4

GIFs from a Mac screen recording

Press Shift Command 5, choose Record Selected Portion, draw a box and click Record. Stop it from the menu bar and a MOV lands on your Desktop. Two things catch people out.

Retina doubles the pixels. A box 800 points wide records at 1,600 pixels. Scale it to half, or the GIF ends up about four times heavier than it needs to be.

Interfaces don't want dithering. Flat buttons and text look crisper without it. In ffmpeg, swap the end of the command for paletteuse=dither=none. In the browser converter, choose Small.

What about ezgif and Photoshop?

ezgif is free and it works, and half the industry has it bookmarked. The difference is that it uploads your file to its servers. For a public trailer, who cares. For a director's cut nobody has signed off, we'd keep it on the machine.

Photoshop works too, and it's slow. File > Import > Video Frames to Layers, then File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy). If you already pay for it and want to fix frame 37 by hand, go for it. Otherwise Gifski does the same job in a tenth of the clicks.

Why some clips shrink and others don't

We only understood this after measuring the loops on this blog. The Nike ACG leap above is 680 px wide, 15 fps and two seconds long, and it weighs 0.54 MB. Absolut's volcano below is narrower, runs at only 10 fps for the same two seconds, and weighs 1.16 MB. More than double, with fewer frames.

The difference is what's in the frame. Lava is hundreds of oranges moving in every direction, so every frame is new information. The floating metro carriage is 53 frames of soft purple mist where very little changes, and it comes in at 0.54 MB too. Flat colour and stillness are cheap. Texture and movement are expensive. If a GIF won't shrink, it's usually the footage, not the settings. Our GIF compressor will squeeze a finished file to a target size, and the GIF file size guide ranks every fix by how much it saved us.

When the video is a reference, not your footage

Most of the GIFs we make aren't from our own rushes. They're from references: the reel a director sent at midnight, a campaign on Vimeo, a TikTok with the exact whip pan we want to pitch. Downloading each one, finding the file and converting it is a lot of faff for a four-second loop.

That's the job Spark was built for. It gathers reels, TikToks, Vimeo links and the rest into one searchable library on your Mac. Open a saved video, click Export GIF, nudge the in and out points by a second or a tenth, pick 8 to 24 fps and a width from 320 to 1080 px, and it lands in Frames, ready for the deck.

For a one-off, Gifski or the browser tool is all you need. If you're building decks every week out of videos you found online, keep the references and the GIFs in the same place, so the next pitch starts from a library and not from your Downloads folder.

FAQs

Can QuickTime convert MP4 to GIF?

No. QuickTime Player can trim and export video, but not as a GIF. Use it to trim the clip, then convert with Gifski, the Shortcuts Make GIF action, Keynote, ffmpeg or a browser converter.

How do I convert MOV to GIF on a Mac?

Exactly the same way as MP4. Gifski, Shortcuts, Keynote, ffmpeg and Spark's browser converter all accept MOV files, including iPhone videos and screen recordings. With ffmpeg, change the input file name to input.mov.

What's the best free GIF maker for Mac?

Gifski. It's free on the Mac App Store, gives you width, frame rate and a quality slider, and makes very clean GIFs. The current version needs macOS 26, with older builds on its GitHub page. If you can't install apps, use a browser converter that runs locally, like ours.

How do I make a GIF from an iPhone video on my Mac?

AirDrop the video to your Mac or drag it out of Photos onto the Desktop, then convert it with any method above. iPhone footage is high resolution, so scale it down to 480 or 640 px wide or the GIF will be enormous.

Why is the GIF bigger than my MP4?

Because GIF is an image format from 1987, not a video codec. In our test, 4 seconds at 480 px was 0.29 MB as an MP4 and 1.85 MB as a well made GIF. Keep GIFs short and narrow, and send video wherever it will play.

Is ezgif safe for client footage?

ezgif uploads your file to its servers to convert it. That's fine for public footage. For unreleased or confidential work, use something that converts on your own Mac: Gifski, ffmpeg, Keynote, Shortcuts or our browser converter.